


Seven Caffeinated Days

by Ywain Penbrydd (penbrydd)



Series: Vexation of Spirit [4]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), The Lone Gunmen (TV)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Awkward Romance, Bad Jokes, Byers doesn't need this shit, Crying After Sex, Curtain Fic, Everyone is Bisexual, First Time Bottoming, Hallucinations During Orgasm, Light Angst, M/M, Old Arguments with Old Friends, Things Not to Do With Potato Cannons, Wall Sex, canon-typical misuse of technology, disaster porn, if you can even call it romance, nerds in lust, past trauma, two geniuses. no common sense.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-06-12 22:49:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 82,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15350469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penbrydd/pseuds/Ywain%20Penbrydd
Summary: In the wake of the Narcisse, Reid's apartment is a crime scene, and he has a week off, whether or not he wants it.It's like Seven Drunken Nights, but not...





	1. The First Day

**Author's Note:**

> Each day is more than one chapter, but days will be marked in chapter titles. I have no idea what I'm doing, tbh, and it probably shows. Chapters when I get around to it.

The first thing Reid became aware of, as he woke, suddenly, was that the smell of the room was wrong. This wasn't his home. His eyes stayed closed, breathing steady, aside from the sharp breath when he first came to, as he catalogued the sensations around him. Definitely a bed, and one his feet didn't stick off the end of, despite the fact that he seemed to be a bit more below than on the pillows. No wires or tubes, no sounds of medical machinery. No pyjamas, either. He was naked and-- The panic cut off as quickly as it started, his brain finally sorting out the scent of the room. Langly. He'd gone home with Langly.  
  
... Who was no longer in bed with him.  
  
How long had he slept, he wondered, slowly sitting up in the dark, realising for the first time that the room had no light leaks, and the glow stars had run out long before he woke. Darkness. Absolute, impenetrable darkness coiled around him, carrying visions of a thousand things he didn't want to remember and some he was relatively sure didn't exist. A hazy memory of a clip light on a bracket beside the bed came back to him, and he ran a tense hand along the wall until he hit it, the dim glow blinding after perfect darkness. He rubbed his eyes and took in what he could see in the dim puddle of light around him -- his clothes were no longer on the floor, and neither was the scattering of Langly's laundry from the night before. As his eyes focused, he spotted a note on the bedside table and, under it, clean clothes, albeit _Langly's_ clothes.  
  
'Didn't want to wake you. Everything's in the wash, but this should fit. I'm going to go twist Byers's arm about a pot of coffee, and try to remember what normal looks like around here. Grab some breakfast on your way up. You can grab me, too, but not if I'm holding the soldering iron. -L'  
  
Shower first, Reid decided, before remembering the lightly blood-spotted bandages on his arms. Still, he wasn't touching food until he managed to wash his hands, after... No, shower first. His arms couldn't be as bad as he remembered. It had to be the stress distorting his recollections, his hands still numbed from the panic he'd woken up in.  
  
As it turned out, they were worse than he remembered. Not actually serious, by any means, but he'd lost deep enough divots of flesh that just washing made a few start to bleed again. The woman had been fighting for her life. To be entirely fair, so had he.  
  
Damp, but less bloody, he made his way toward the kitchen, dressed in Langly's clothes and awkwardly-wrapped fresh bandages. A faint smell of laundry detergent hung around a closed door, just before the hallway turned toward the part of the building he was more familiar with. For certain values of familiar. He'd only been there twice, but most of that time had been spent forward of the kitchen.  
  
Byers looked up from a pile of papers scattered across one end of the massive table that took up the other side of the kitchen, away from the coffee maker and the stove. "Dr Reid! You're awake!"  
  
"How long have I been asleep?" Reid thought to ask, before realising that was a question that Byers wouldn't be able to answer.  
  
"I don't know that, but I do know it's been fifteen hours since you got here, twelve hours since the two of you disappeared into the back, and Langly's been back up for six of those." Byers leaned back and tacked something to the pinboard on the wall behind him, yawning. "There's coffee, if you want some. I'd say you should grab some toast, but Frohike was threatening to cook after he got done testing the latest prototype of whatever it is Langly's working on that I'm not allowed to look at. He's got this pet project that comes out every couple of years, and I know it's the same one, because every time, he tells me to wait until he's done, and then I'll be forced to acknowledge his genius."  
  
Reid poured himself a cup of coffee while Byers was talking. "That seems a little hyperbolic, on his part."  
  
"He means I'll really like it. I don't even know what it is, but I have some suspicions with the way he's so insistent, when he's actually working on it." Byers gestured to a seat and Reid took it. "I think you're his inspiration, this time."  
  
" _Me_? No. Maybe this case. Maybe reclaiming his identity --  _an_ identity -- but... no. I don't know what he's working on, either." Reid shook his head. "It's really probably that he's finally feeling in control of his life, again, in a way he hasn't been able to since your deaths."  
  
Byers chuckled and sipped his own coffee. "You're the profiler, but I'm still right. I can count the number I've seen him actually happy, in the thirty years I've known him. Maybe not on my fingers, but I can count every one. Happy, not smug. He's insufferably smug on a regular basis. I've seen him genuinely smile more in the last month than in the entire time I've known him. He hasn't been giddy like this since that time he got to meet Captain Toby." He paused as a raw-voiced 'fuck you!' echoed off the ceiling. "By the regular pattern of expletives, he's got the soldering iron, probably on another hardware binge, and I'd bet a very large number of Frohike's excellent pancakes that you're his muse."  
  
"That's Frohike's investment, not yours." Reid smiled thinly, over the top of his coffee. "You're not that sure, or you'd put yourself on the line."  
  
"At this point in my career, I don't have much worth betting, other than money, and that seems vulgar, under the circumstances."  
  
"Because you already know my income after taxes," Reid remarked, a little tartly. "Do you cook, at all?"  
  
"A few things," Byers admitted. "Most of what we eat, these days, is apocalypse food. Can't order too much fresh food or too much takeout, or people start getting suspicious. This place isn't zoned residential, and none of us exist. I learned to cook in self-defence."  
  
"Put breakfast on it. ... Lunch. What meal is this? If I'm right, you're cooking." Reid's eyes sparkled.  
  
"And if I'm right, you're cooking? I hope you know how to handle freeze-dried ingredients." Byers returned a look both curious and somewhat arrogant.  
  
"It's not going to be a problem. I'm not wrong." Reid finished his coffee and got up.  
  
Byers sat back and watched him head toward the next room, where Langly was working.  
  
Langly had his headphones on, and the music turned up loud enough that he couldn't hear a damned thing that wasn't the Dead Milkmen. His massive, heavy desk was scattered with parts of other projects he'd pushed aside, and half a potato sat in a cup of sauce, just far enough out that he wouldn't knock it over onto what he was working on. He sang along, absently, as he soldered another wire in place.  
  
"Your dad is the Vice President." The hot iron clinked against a heavy clay dish, as Langly set it aside. "Your dad's the Duke of Earl, yeah, you're for me, Punk Rock Girl!" He kicked off, spinning the stool at the last word, and dropped a foot as he came face to collarbone with Reid.  
  
His free hand shot up and tugged the headphones down around his neck. "Oh. Hey." He paused awkwardly. "Dryer's probably done."  
  
Reid raised an eyebrow, amused, as he glanced over Langly's shoulder. "What are you working on?"  
  
"Right now? Replacement phones. Yours and mine are evidence, and even if we get them back, I wouldn't trust them, after that. New hardware, new exchange, we'll be fine." Langly shrugged, still looking less than entirely comfortable.  
  
"What's Frohike testing?" Reid asked. "Byers said something about some long-term project..."  
  
"Ask me that when Byers isn't leaning against the wall with a glass to his ear, trying to figure out what I've spent twenty years trying to give him for his birthday." This time, Langly smiled, though a little sharply. "It's never good enough. By the time I catch up with the technology, I have to wait for it to catch up with me, and then I have to start again. The price of innovation. And, I mean, it shouldn't even be innovation at this point. Someone else should already be making money off this idea. But, even now, the lag's horrible for synchronous transmission over more than about six hops, even if you're only sending point data-- and I just said I wasn't talking about this."  
  
"You did," Reid nodded. "Now, do me a favour and tell Byers he's wrong--"  
  
"Byers! You're wrong!" Langly shouted, and the words echoed off the high ceiling. "About what?"  
  
"He thinks I'm your _muse_. His word. I keep telling him you're just remembering what it's like to be alive."  
  
Langly froze, blinking the last couple inches up at Reid. "Byers! You're right!"  
  
"Victory is mine! Breakfast is yours!" Byers leaned around the doorway. "Never bet against a pro, Dr Reid."  
  
Reid stood there looking like he'd been hit with a brick. " _Excuse_ me?"  
  
"You know how it is." Langly shrugged, trying to look casual and failing miserably. "I was thinking about you, and that got me off on --" he raised his voice "-- _something I'm not talking about, Byers_ , and then I realised I still hadn't finished this, and I didn't just want it for Byers, I wanted it for you, too. I took a gigantic risk putting myself out there, and I just want to make sure this is finished, or even finished enough, in case anything... happens." He paused and blinked. "I mean, I did already get shot at, this week, for the first time in a long time."  
  
Reid looked away, taking a deep breath as the weight of that last landed on him again.  
  
"If you apologise to me again, for that, you're sleeping on the couch." Langly pointed firmly at Reid, in the limited space between them. "I made an asshole decision, and almost got myself killed. That evil witch found me because I grabbed your phone, so I could talk to Kimmy for you. That was not the plan. The plan was that I shouldn't even be talking, so he wouldn't overhear me, but I heard him start pulling that shit with you and I just lost it for a minute. Which is to say, if anyone's to blame, here, it's me, but she was already watching you and probably the rest of your people, too. I mean, what's the better outcome, here, she goes after the Black Queen or Agent Jareau's family, or she goes after both of us, together? Yeah, none of those is great, but at least there were two of us, and we're both good at this."  
  
"Some part of me knows you're right, but I just... I'm not there, yet. Surprise, I'm not taking this as well as you are."  
  
"Excuse you, which one of us was a sobbing mess five minutes later? Not you." Langly leaned back and turned off the soldering iron, wiping his hands on his jeans, before he finally reached for Reid. "You're alive. I'm alive. I'm trying not to think about the number of federal agents who may have witnessed my naked ass."  
  
"Think about my cooking, instead," Reid offered, as Langly leaned against his chest. "That was the bet with Byers. I'm cooking breakfast, because he was right."  
  
Langly jerked back, spooked. "Wait, is that even a thing you can do? Cooking? I mean, don't worry about me. I've eaten." He grabbed the half a potato, hours cold, and stuffed most of it in his mouth, in a single bite.  
  
"How far into my files did you get? You know I have to be able to cook at least a little."  
  
Langly choked down the mouthful of potato. "The microwave is a wonderful invention."  
  
"I'll have you know I make an excellent grilled cheese." Reid's eyes rounded as he remembered what Byers had said about freeze dried ingredients. "Assuming you have bread, cheese, and butter."  
  
"Pretty sure we can manage that. Byers try to scare you with the apocalypse food?" Langly untangled his other leg from the stool and nudged Reid out of the way, so he could get up. "I mean, yeah, most of it is sealed in cans and destined to last until the end of the world, but you'd be surprised how well cheese keeps. There's a reason cheese cellars are a thing. Also can't promise real butter, so I'm hoping you can work margarine. Bread, though? We don't just have bread, we have good bread. Frohike decided he needed a bread machine, at some point, and I don't think I'm ever buying sandwich bread again."  
  
"Tell me you've got lentil soup and curry powder?" Reid asked, following Langly back toward the kitchen.  
  
"You couldn't pay me to eat a lentil."  
  
"Tomato soup?" Reid sounded less hopeful, this time.  
  
" _Canned soup_?" Byers protested. "I don't know if that counts as cooking!"  
  
"It's a condiment!"


	2. Chapter 2

Frohike came into the kitchen, following the smell of roasted onions and sizzling grease. "What'd I miss?" he asked, looking at the three men with sandwiches in their hands, all conspiring over the end of the kitchen table not covered in papers.  
  
"Boy Genius needs more bread," Langly replied, talking with his mouth full and gesturing at Reid with his elbow, not to have to take a hand off the sandwich dribbling grease onto his plate.  
  
"Dr Reid lost a bet," Byers filled in, explaining nothing at all.  
  
"I made you a sandwich, too, but Langly ate it," Reid apologised, looking more amused than anything, as he got up. "I'll make another batch, since you're standing here."  
  
"Thirty years of living with a raccoon," Frohike accused, shooting Langly an exasperated look.  
  
"Twenty-nine, and I don't think raccoons make very good sysadmins," Langly retorted. "Maybe if you were actually here, I wouldn't have to eat your breakfast for you."  
  
"Raccoons don't make very good sysadmins." Frohike spread his hands and tipped his head at Byers. "He finally admits we could have better."  
  
Langly grabbed a burnt scrap of crust from Byers's plate and winged it at Frohike. "Fuck you."  
  
"Hey!" Byers squawked.  
  
"Just not pretty enough, even in that mini-dress." Frohike shook his head and leaned on the corner of the kitchen island, where a pile of sliced onion and cheese still sat on the cutting board. "Besides, I wouldn't want Boy Genius getting jealous."  
  
"Okay, that's twice." Reid slammed the broiler and stood, a motion like like water spilling backward. "Knock it off. I'm almost forty."  
  
"He's almost forty." Frohike raised his eyebrows at Byers. "What was I like at forty?"  
  
"An obnoxious prick with absolutely no chill," Langly filled in, licking grease off his fingers.  
  
"I'd say it must be a feature of the age, because that was also you at forty, but that was you every year between twenty-one and fifty."  
  
There was a squeak as Langly kicked his chair back on the tile floor.  
  
"Why is _he_ your test subject?" Reid asked Langly, before dropping back down, with the board of cheese and onions, to flip the bread and load the next batch of sandwiches.  
  
"Because I don't feel like listening to Byers cry, until I've got it right."  
  
"I'm going to _cry_? And this is a _gift_?"  
  
"Susanne made you cry, too, and you love her." Langly gave Byers a long-suffering look.  
  
"That was different. I loved her first, and _then_ she made me cry," Byers protested picking greasy crumbs out from under his nails.  
  
"Will you just trust me? I know what I'm doing." Langly sighed and leaned back in his chair, stretching.  
  
"For once, I'm going to have to agree. If this thing ever works the way it's supposed to -- and it's pretty close, this time -- I think you're going to fall in love all over again." Frohike glanced down at where Reid was still crouched in front of the oven, counting seconds by tapping his thumb on the handle. "Hopefully with the device, and not with Langly."  
  
"Ew. Please not me." Langly held up his hands defensively. "I mean, I'm exactly the kind of guy to keep a harem of gorgeous geniuses, but emphasis on 'gorgeous'."  
  
"Which is exactly why you couldn't get a date for fifty years," Frohike drawled.  
  
"Maybe I couldn't get a date because I didn't want a date. Ever think of that?"  
  
Frohike and Byers looked at each other contemplatively, for a moment.  
  
"No," Frohike replied, shaking his head as the broiler drawer squeaked open again.  
  
"Obviously not having a problem, now!" Langly gestured in the general direction of where Reid crouched between the kitchen island and the stove, assembling sandwiches onto the now-empty cutting board.  
  
"Does it really count as a date, if you're driven together by circumstance?" Byers asked, a glimmer of amusement in the corners of his eyes.  
  
"I can promise you 'circumstance' was only the first and last step. Circumstance is why the FBI walked in on me naked, not why I was pantsless somewhere other than our house in the first place," Langly argued. "And I will only admit to that because you already know."  
  
"After this morning, that's not the only thing I know." Frohike raised his eyebrows.  
  
Reid set the sandwiches on the kitchen island. "I should've taken the hotel room."  
  
"Sorry." Langly almost sounded actually apologetic. "But, you weren't in any shape to be driving, and there's way too many cameras -- which I know is why they wanted you there. But, hey, here we've got surveillance _and_ you'd need a cutting torch and like half a day to get through the wall!"  
  
"Unfortunately, what we don't have is soundproofing on any of the inner walls." Byers rubbed his face and eyed the stack of sandwiches contemplatively.  
  
"I have headphones. Were we really ever going to need it?" Langly shrugged and crossed his ankles. "Obviously, things have changed."  
  
"Two feds know where we live," Frohike pointed out. "I'm not sure now is the time to be making further investments in this place."  
  
Reid pushed the sandwiches toward Frohike with one finger. "You should know it's actually impossible to torture information out of me. And I know that. First hand." A brittle smile crossed his face as he looked up. "And when I say 'you should know', what I mean is 'you should know'. I shouldn't have to tell you that."  
  
"No one should have to know that about themselves," Byers said, quietly. "But, that wouldn't have been our first concern."  
  
"Langly tell you about that time he got shot full of scary CIA drugs and brainwashed in a couple of hours?" Frohike grabbed a sandwich and a paper towel to eat it over.  
  
"Sorry I almost shot your girlfriend, Byers." This time, Langly didn't sound anything like sorry.  
  
"Jimmy Belmont in Las Vegas," Reid remembered. " _Hours?_ Are you sure?"  
  
"We didn't leave him by himself for long." Frohike shook his head.  
  
"I'm missing time, but I'm not missing that much time." Langly shrugged, dismissively. "Point is, assuming that shit's still in circulation -- and it's been enough years for someone to replicate that research -- they're not going to need to break your fingers. They're not even going to need to ask you questions. Here I am worried about snipers, and maybe I should be more concerned about my own personal Lady Finella -- show up, shoot my ass, and throw yourself under a bus, before anyone asks too many questions." He sighed and closed his eyes.  
  
"To be fair, Lady Finella was a lot more inventive than that. That seems a bit more Jael." Reid rubbed at a spot on his elbow, looking down at the bandages on his arms. There was a joke in there about getting nailed, but he wasn't going to make it and Frohike's mouth was full. "I know this is the part where I'm supposed to say something reassuring, but I'm all out of reassurance, today. The CIA _is_ involved, because of the credit card, and Narcisse has been yelling your name at anyone who would listen. I know you're not you, any more, but we both know Rossi only went along with that, because he didn't want to make more trouble for _me_. I have no reason to believe anyone on the CIA side of this case has been around long enough to be aware of you, but with Landau's card in question, anyone who knew him and still has clearance is probably interested. And that probably puts all of us in some amount of danger."  
  
Langly's eyes snapped open and he squinted intently at Byers. "Two words: worth it." He pointed at Byers and offered Reid a thin half-smile. "After all the shit this asshole dragged us through for his darling Susanne..."  
  
"Didn't I say 'don't be me'?" Byers protested. "Didn't you tell me you had absolutely no intention of repeating my mistakes, because I'd made enough of them for all of us?"  
  
"I'm not repeating your mistakes, Byers. I'm expounding upon them. I'm making new and horrible mistakes in my own name."  
  
"This is what happens when you don't get laid in high school." Frohike set half the greasy sandwich down and wiped his hands. "You wind up being sixteen and stupid in middle age."  
  
"Assumptions, Frohike." Langly folded his arms.  
  
"You going to prove me wrong?" Frohike poured himself a cup of coffee. "After all these years?"  
  
"No." Langly smirked. "Still none of your business."  
  
"I rest my case." Frohike returned to his sandwich. "Sixteen and stupid just caught up with you."  
  
"I feel like I should point out that I didn't have sex in high school, but I'm not sure that would actually help." Reid cut a sliver off of one of the remaining sandwiches, for himself.  
  
"You were twelve," Byers pointed out. "It doesn't count."  
  
"In addition to which--" Frohike stood up as tall as he could manage and looked up at Reid. "--you're the other half of this disaster of a relationship."  
  
Langly shot a look at Reid. "Garbage barge."  
  
Reid slapped a hand over his mouth and snickered. "It's still not romantic," he managed, as the laughter receded to the corners of his eyes.  
  
"Not really supposed to be romantic. Just accurate."  
  
"And yet, you're still pursuing this." Byers glanced at Reid. "Nothing personal. Under other circumstances..."  
  
"It's too goddamn late now," Langly pointed out. "No matter what I do -- what we do -- at this point, he's still on the hook. Sixteen and stupid or not, I'll pay for my own mistakes."  
  
"And so will we," Byers pointed out.  
  
"Like you didn't drag my ass into your shit with Susanne the first time I met you! She lied to you, you lied to me, and we're all lucky we got out of that alive!"  
  
"I didn't lie to you."  
  
"That's not even the point, Byers. I didn't even know you, and you almost got me killed. And then I did know you, and you almost got me killed again. I think I deserve a little leeway, here."  
  
"Like the number of times you almost got _yourself_ killed, in between?"  
  
Frohike reached for another sandwich, catching Reid's attention. "So. How's your mother doing?"  
  
Reid's eyes hardened, and he shook his head. "I shouldn't be here."  
  
"This is the safest place for you to be, for all of us, right now. If you're in here, you're not out there, which is what Byers is so wound up about. Once you leave here, you become dangerous." Frohike took a bite of the sandwich. "To yourself and us."  
  
"I can't stay here forever."  
  
"I'd never suggest it. But, I am going to suggest that you spend a lot of time around other people. These guys have been waiting more than fifteen years for us, and assuming they're still waiting, they're extremely patient and extremely dangerous. You wouldn't be the first fed they've gone after, and they've been mostly successful." Frohike sighed and sipped his coffee. "In any reasonable circumstance, this would be the part where we disappear, again. But, this isn't a reasonable circumstance, as indicated by the fact that Langly is getting laid."  
  
"I have significant difficulty believing that's a first." Reid glanced across the room as the argument got louder. "So, assume I'm a target and behave accordingly. Well, this is an unpleasant reversal." He paused. "My _mother_."  
  
Frohike shook his head. "If half of what's in the records is true, nobody's going to look twice at her."  
  
"It's been demonstrated that she's a way to get to me. And that's not going to change."  
  
"It's also been demonstrated that you're surprisingly easy to kidnap, when you're not in prison." Frohike shrugged. "I wouldn't worry too much about her. No more than you already do."  
  
Reid's face went through a cascade from defensive anger to dawning clarity. "You haven't just been through my records. You've been through hers. Good. We can use that. Can you--"  
  
Frohike shook his head and gestured across the room, at the bickering duo. "Probably not, if you're going to ask me to do something with those records, but one of them could. Good head on your shoulders."  
  
"Thanks. I'd like to keep it there."  
  
"Hanging out with us isn't necessarily good for that, but as Langly pointed out, it's too damn late, now." Frohike stared into his coffee, for a moment, before he put it down and pulled two cans of soda out of the fridge, popping one open in each hand, as he crossed the room. A moment's pause, and then he poured one down the back of Langly's neck.  
  
Langly shrieked and jumped up, slamming one knee and then the other on the table before he managed.  
  
Frohike pointed at Byers over the top of the other can. "The two of you need to knock it off. Special Agent Studly needs you to do something useful."  
  
Reid covered his face, hoping if he stayed still enough he'd melt into the floor.  
  
"Studly Do-Right wouldn't have poured a freezing Coke down my back," Langly snapped, grabbing the nearly empty can from Frohike and drinking the rest.  
  
"Studly Do-Right didn't want to interrupt your territorial displays." Frohike jerked the other can out of Langly's reach, as Langly went for it. "I, on the other hand, have no such compunctions."  
  
"Christ. My hair. My everything. You know what I didn't need today? A frosty Coke down my asscrack." Langly looked down in disgust. "I think it's running into my socks."  
  
Reid squeaked and sidestepped, as Byers touched his elbow. He hadn't heard the man get up.  
  
"You okay?" Byers asked, offering a sympathetic look.  
  
"Ask me that in an hour," Reid replied, blinking over the tips of his fingers, before he dropped his hands from his face, trying to look like he hadn't been wondering whether it was possible to die of embarrassment. On the other hand, still better than JJ and Rossi walking in on him naked, so this probably wasn't going to do it unless repeat exposure had weakened him to it.  
  
"What do you need? They're going to be at it for a few more minutes."  
  
Reid began to explain his plan, building on things he'd seen Garcia do and heard Langly talk about, however abstractly.

* * *

"Anyone wants to get near your mother, they're going to have to get through me." Langly tipped his chair back and smiled proudly up at Reid. "And the shitty facial recognition that's probably going to give us hundreds of false positives, before we get it trained. I mean, this also assumes that none of the current staff, where she is, are already turned, but it looks like they've had a hiring freeze for months, so it's pretty unlikely, unless somebody's been on you for unrelated reasons. I swear to you, if there's any question -- if we're not _sure_ about someone -- I will break things until I'm sure they'll have to be rescued by the fire department. I slipped a few nasties into the security system, and any of us can trigger them with the touch of a button. Several buttons, depending on where and how hard. She'll be fine. Like I said, most places pretty much just have evil eye charms, when it comes to the kind of work I do. It'll keep the riffraff out, but you've got yourself a pro."  
  
Frohike snorted and horror slowly dawned on Byers's face.  
  
"Ew." Byers pointed at Frohike. "No. And that would be the other way, anyway." He froze, mouth open, blinking at Reid's back. "I'm going to go get more coffee. Does anyone want more coffee?"  
  
Langly finally caught up and spun his chair around, leaning to the side to see around Reid, as Byers attempted to make his escape. "Did you just call Special Agent Studly Do-Right a _hooker_?"  
  
"Frohike said it, not me!" Byers pointed and broke for the kitchen.  
  
"No offence to your delightful companion, but I don't know what else the appeal would be," Frohike teased, shrugging. "It's gotta be the thing we know you've got skills for."  
  
"Have I said it enough times? No?" Langly tensed, pulling his knees and ankles together, hands curling in his lap. "None of your goddamn business."  
  
Reid's face relaxed in the way it only did in casinos, and he leaned on the back of Langly's chair. "Even if we don't tell him, I'm pretty sure he knows better. He's just trying to block out this morning."  
  
One of Langly's hands leapt up, spanning his cheeks and knocking his glasses up, as his shoulders shook with embarrassed laughter. "He's got a point."  
  
"Are you _always_ that loud?" Frohike asked, astonished and irritated.  
  
"Exhaustion," Reid volunteered.  
  
"Relief," Langly countered. "I mean, come on, we almost got killed!"  
  
"You almost got killed again, except I would've had to look at your naked ass to murder you."  
  
"Some people apparently don't have your restraint." Reid smiled uncomfortably.  
  
"I was wearing a towel at the time. Maybe I shouldn't have been. That's it -- if I stop wearing pants, I'll never have to worry about snipers again. My naked ass will fend off all attempts to shoot me in it."  
  
Reid leaned harder on the back of the chair, tipping Langly back. He said nothing, but raised his eyebrows and waited.  
  
Langly blinked, and then, "Augh! That was horrible! That was horrible and you didn't even have to say it! How do you _do_ that?!"  
  
"And with that, young lovers, I'm going to go triple-check that the surveillance up here is still disabled, because I don't want to accidentally see any of this, later." Frohike stalked off, glancing back just before he passed into the next room. "By the way, I think you've got it, this time, Langly. The, ah... thing. It works better than the one we tested you know where, and all you've got left to worry about is the transfer rate. And maybe tighten up the obscene amount of wiring. But, in the same room with it? Perfect."  
  
"God, if only." Langly rolled his eyes and sighed.  
  
"I'm still clueless," Reid reminded him.  
  
"I'm still not talking about it, out here." Langly rocked the chair forward and let the momentum carry him to his feet. "All we have to do is walk in that direction, and Byers will go on a quest for earplugs."


	3. Chapter 3

"I have written this thing so many times, I can lay down the base in any of eight languages, in my sleep," Langly complained, tossing Reid a complication of wires, synthetic fabric, and straps. "Shake it out and it'll make sense. Goes on your ..." He untangled another one. "... left hand. This is the right one."  
  
Reid pulled on the glove and Langly reached over to adjust the solid parts, untangling the wires and braiding them together as he plugged them into a larger plug and then attached that to the working laptop at the foot of the bed.  
  
"Okay, so, it's not going to do anything for a minute. Just wiggle your fingers a bit, so I can make sure it's working." Langly stared at the screen and clicked a few buttons, watching numbers scroll up one side of the screen and dots move on the other. He nodded, after a moment, and clicked to a different tab, putting a decent impression of Reid's hand on the screen.  
  
"Motion capture?" Reid asked, watching the hand on the screen mimic his own motions.  
  
"Oh, that's only half of it," Langly said, strapping on the other glove and adjusting it to his own hand. "Step out a couple of feet from me. Don't worry, I'll reset your zero so you're still in frame. I'll have to, if this is going to work."  
  
The other tab, again, as Langly got his own glove working, and then back to the visual, now with two hands. "Now, imagine this with the woman of your dreams."

Eyes on the screen, Langly reached over and curled his hand around nothing as his hand on the screen closed around Reid's.  
  
Reid's eyes rounded as he felt the ghost hand close on his own, slices of memory suddenly scattering behind his eyes. "This is great," he managed, clawing at the glove to get it off. "This is really great, and it's ... I know what you were thinking. It's just... not something I can do, right now. But, I understand, and it's going to be a wonderful gift. Assuming you can find Susanne."  
  
"I don't have to find her." Langly unplugged Reid's glove and got up to help Reid out of the last few straps. "I want to, but I can recreate her from fresh motion capture data and old video. She won't be real, but ... she'll be better for him than being alone."  
  
"Don't do that." Reid swallowed hard, holding onto his own elbows. "That won't be better. That would be so much worse. I know you don't understand, because you don't work that way, but _don't_. If you can't find her, give him a face he doesn't know. But, I hope you find her, because that would be the best gift. With the assumption she still wants to see him, of course."  
  
"You're right," Langly said, after a moment. "I really don't understand, but I never did, so I'm going to take your word for it." He put a hand by Reid's elbow, but didn't touch.  
  
"But, you understand _that_." Reid looked at the hand and then at Langly's face.  
  
"Look, I usually know how not to get punched in the face, but it also takes getting punched in the face a few times to sink in. So, yeah, I do know better, by now. That and I try not to do things I hate people doing to me, which covers a hell of a lot of things." Langly relaxed a bit as Reid stepped in along his arm, still determinedly blank-faced and wrapped around himself. "You want to tell me what just went wrong?"  
  
"Me." Reid took a moment to compose his thoughts, nudging Langly's arm encouragingly, until it settled around his waist. "I have seen some things that I still don't know what to do with. Things that might be described as 'high-octane nightmare fuel', to borrow a phrase. And that ... you need to understand that it's incredible, and I love that you're doing it. But, it's right on the edge of a few of those things, for me -- the sensation, the sensory discord. The feeling is very close to things I wish I didn't know, but I can't afford to forget."  
  
"Then I guess I shouldn't offer you another way to work off the tension when you can't sleep," Langly joked with a hint of a smile that didn't reach his eyes, still heavy with concern.  
  
"Oh, my god." Reid muffled a laugh against Langly's shoulder.   
  
"You okay?" Langly asked, as the laugh died down.  
  
"Yeah." Reid nodded, face still pressed against Langly's shoulder. "Just... be here, for a minute. Be real."  
  
"Usually, this would be the part where I'd make a joke about AI and world domination, but I don't really think that's a good idea."  
  
"Thanks," Reid drawled, finally lifting his head with a dry look. "Really appreciate that."  
  
"I'd still like to get motion data from you, at some point. Just ... comparative stuff -- sitting, walking, conversational gestures. I want to run your numbers against mine, because we're about the same size." Langly put his other hand, still gloved, on Reid's hip. "If you're up for that. I will absolutely disconnect all of the feedback lines from the suit. I promise."  
  
Reid nodded, with a faint suggestion of a smile. "I'd actually like to see the data from the comparison. That could be interesting. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to go around looking like a Locutus of Borg cosplayer."  
  
"You'd have to be bald, for that." Langly chuffed in amusement and leaned back to look at Reid's face. "Maybe a rule sixty-three Seven of Nine, though..."  
  
"You're the blond in the room, not me."  
  
"As previously established, I am not that hot."  
  
"Evidence suggests otherwise." Reid finally let go of his own elbows and rested his hands at Langly's hips.  
  
"I dispute any evidence gathered while you were hallucinating. There are a lot of benefits to being me, but a pretty face is not one of them."  
  
"Then maybe it's a good thing I don't remember where I left my glasses," Reid teased. "But, I do like looking at you, especially in motion. Speaking of motion, have you looked at your own data, yet? Not just the numbers, but applied? Because you should see what I see, when I look at you."  
  
"I don't spend a lot of time looking at myself. Kind of creeps me out, really. The numbers are good enough, and if I need to see something, I have Frohike's data." Langly shook his head.  
  
"So play yours back on a blank model, so it's less weird. You'll probably get some clipping, but it should be clean enough."  
  
"Thought you didn't do computers, in your plain and simple life." Langly stepped back and dropped onto the edge of the bed, gesturing for Reid to join him.  
  
"I only do computers for _work_. I'm a profiler, remember? Motion capture and composite faces have gotten to be important tools for building testing scenarios, along with neural networks loaded with sequences taken from interview videos and surveillance. The AI isn't terrible at the links between certain moods and actions, but it makes the occasional connection that no reasonable person would, and I think, sometimes, those are the best scenarios -- the ones where the data you're holding doesn't support the conclusion you're being shown, and you have to figure out why. People aren't always predictable, either, and while it's important to have a firm grip on what usually works, the reminder that it's only 'usually' is also useful at higher levels." Reid paused, trying to shove his hands into pockets that weren't where he expected them to be, as he took in Langly's dazed look. "You can tell me to stop, if I'm boring you to tears."  
  
"Are you kidding me?" Langly's eyes sparkled. "That is the opposite of boring, and I'm going to drag all of the details out of you, at some point, with some combination of bribery and... and... bribery."  
  
"I'm not sure if two of the same thing get an 'and'," Reid teased, sitting down at Langly's side. "Unless I missed an innuendo."  
  
"Innuendo and out the door," Langly muttered, eyes on the laptop as he loaded some old data.  
  
"Not yet, you haven't."  
  
Langly blinked a few times and glanced over his shoulder at Reid. "You're terrible. Everyone you work with thinks you're some darling innocent to be shielded from the evils of personal relationships, and here you are making dick jokes like you _live here_."  
  
Reid pressed his hands together in front of his chest and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling in a perfect parody of innocence. "It's my simple, monastic lifestyle. And the part where I only make jokes like that in front of them about once a year, if that. Keeps them on their toes."  
  
"Chaotic good in the service of Law," Langly accused, back to squinting at the numbers in front of him.  
  
"Neutral good," Reid argued, leaning to the side to curl around Langly's back, head propped on his hand, so he could see the screen. "You're the agent of chaos, here."  
  
"Thanks, I try." Langly reached back to rumple Reid's hair before tipping the laptop so it was easier for both of them to see. "Here, watch this for me. I don't know if I can look."  
  
"How bad could it be? What were you doing?"  
  
"Working on the UI. Got all the data collection parts written and tested first and then ran them while I was putting a friendlier front end on it. Which most of the time I can't be bothered with, but I'm not the end user, so it has to make proper sense and have shiny buttons." Langly clicked a button and tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, as the model on the screen snapped into position and started acting out the numbers he'd loaded.  
  
A small sound of amusement slipped out of Reid. "Yeah, that's you."  
  
Langly's gaze drifted back down. "How can you tell?"  
  
Reid tapped the screen. "Something's not working the way you want it to. Look at the legs. You can't usually see yourself from this angle, so you might not recognise it, but that's a classic symptom of distress and you do it every time you get touchy about something."  
  
"I look like a fucking secretary!" Langly complained, rotating the view.  
  
"It's why you wear dresses so well. Enough of your mannerisms are feminine that no one looks twice." Reid shifted to get the arm he wasn't leaning on past Langly's back and traced the motion of one arm. "And it's a really specific subset, too, a lot of the time. What you said before about getting punched in the face? More than half of the ones I've seen on you are related to the long-term expectation of violence. Not what usually reads as fear -- that's short-term. You take up as little space as possible and position yourself so you can easily defend the essentials -- both critical parts of your body and important possessions -- with as little motion as possible, but it's a very different posture to what you find in someone with strong self-defence training. It's what you see in people who are regularly harassed on public transit, and statistically, those people are mostly women, so it comes off as a feminine behaviour."  
  
"You're fucking kidding me." The words fell out of Langly's mouth with no inflection.  
  
"Nope. I've been making the effort not to read you too closely, because it's rude and I don't want to accidentally make an assumption about something you didn't tell me. That... rarely ends in any way I'd want to repeat. But, that one's pretty obvious. I'm guessing you got beat up a lot in school. So did I, but I lost the reflex to the job, mostly." Reid's fingers parted, measuring the distance between the floor plane and the model's feet, hooked on an invisible chair rung. "That's your desk chair, and you sit with your feet hooked back because you're used to being too tall, and now, even though you have a chair that fits, you still do it because you're used to sitting like that, with your knees up. I know that. I do that. A few of the other ones, too. Penalty for being just a little taller than average, although the average has finally caught up with us, in recent years."  
  
"That's really fucked up," Langly decided, still hung up on the previous revelation, as he pulled the conversation back toward it, without taking his eyes off the screen. "Are you telling me every time somebody called me girly, it's because I looked like I was trying not to get punched?"  
  
"A lot of the time, probably." Reid shrugged with his free shoulder. "Not all of them are that. Some of them are how you handle your hair. You have a few others that won't show here, because you're sitting, but the not getting punched ones are the ones that stand out. It took me until that day in the coffee shop to figure out those had nothing to do with me."  
  
"So, what you're saying is ..." Langly shook his head, chasing off the broader implications, for the moment. "That's fucked up. That's not okay at all."  
  
"I would tend to agree." Reid snapped his fingers and pointed as the model moved again, shoulders moving back, legs stretching out. "There. You just solved it. And -- there!" The model's hand bounced to the side in a quick flourish before returning to the invisible keyboard, and its chin tipped up, slightly. "See how you're suddenly taking up more space? You think you deserve it, now. Daring someone to challenge you."  
  
"I really do that, don't I?" An unsettled chuckle slipped out of Langly.  
  
"You collected the data, not me." Reid shrugged again, with an expression of perfect innocence. "Okay, so, we have hours of you typing. I could write a thesis on this, but most of it isn't going to be that interesting. What other test data did you log?"  
  
"I'm not loading that file." Langly laughed nervously.  
  
"Wha--?" And then the light went on behind Reid's eyes, as he remembered what the purpose of this project was, initially. "Really? With who?"  
  
Langly shook his head and laughed again. "Alone. I just needed to make sure the other sensors worked like they were meant to. That was ... I spent weeks swearing at those. I'd been working with the motion sensors so long and the medical sensors were expecting a whole other framework. It was bullshit. But, it works now."  
  
"You should load it." Reid nudged Langly with his knee. "I have actually seen your entire body unclothed and pressed against me. Motion capture data isn't going to turn my head."  
  
"Oh, it will by the time I'm done with it," Langly promised. After a moment, he glanced down at Reid. "You really want to see it? There's not much to see..."  
  
"I want to see if you -- there's this thing that you do, and I have an inordinate number of words about it, but it would be easier to just point it out."  
  
"An inordinate number of words, huh?" Langly looked suspiciously down at Reid.  
  
"Very, very appreciative words." Reid tipped his head to give Langly a sidelong glance. "Of course, if you don't have the data for that, I'm sure I could help you get it."  
  
Langly blinked a few times, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened the file. "God, I love the way you think," he murmured as he checked the numbers before switching to the other tab. "Like I said, it's not much. This wasn't the data I was interested in, for this set. I wanted to make sure it was reading _this_." He pointed to a small graph in the corner of the screen.  
  
Reid watched the model go through a short sequence, maybe a minute, that ended in a hand reaching out to stop the recording, the model's chest heaving. "Is that still the gyro or are you using pressure?"  
  
"Both. I needed the pressure sensors somewhere else, anyway. Didn't take much to add them in a few other places to enhance the results. It's pretty believable, isn't it?"  
  
"Yeah, but it's the wrong angle. You can almost see it around the forty-eight second mark, but you're lying on a flat surface, so the motion doesn't complete." Reid shook his head.  
  
"As opposed to ... what?"  
  
"Prone instead of supine. Maybe even standing, though I wouldn't know. Supporting your own body weight might prevent it."  
  
"Want to find out?"  
  
" _Now?_ " A faint, wicked curl of the lips ruined Reid's otherwise innocent look of surprise.  
  
"Right now. Immediately. Priority research."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Assuming a world in which XF's 'First Person Shooter' happened, none of this is unreasonable. That said, that episode always made me want to punch someone in the face, so...


	4. Chapter 4

"Pull that table over here. We only have six feet of cable, because I'm an idiot who doesn't plan ahead." Langly balanced the laptop on one black-wrapped hand and pointed to the small bedside table with the other. "Actually, the data gets a little wonky around eight feet, because I haven't got it properly shielded. That would be the next step, except I'm trying to get it wireless. The last time I saw that done, though, it was in a shielded room. This kind of thing is really sensitive to lost packets. On the other hand, the technology's really improved over the last... what, almost twenty years."  
  
"Who was working on it, back then?" Reid asked, picking up the table to carry it over to the section of wall they'd chosen -- an outside wall, to avoid giving Byers and Frohike another event to complain about.  
  
"I don't want to talk about it. I don't even really want to think too hard about it. Ask me later, or you're not going to get any good data, because I'm going to be thinking about it." Langly shook his head and set down the laptop, double-checking the connections between parts of the suit.  
  
Not having watched Langly put it on, Reid studied the suit as Langly checked the wires, looking for the snaps that held the sections together. He reached out and tapped the top of a line of them that ran down the inner curve of Langly's hip. "I can tell what you built this for with design like that."  
  
"Pretty sure I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. The crotch panel is actually the answer to 'how am I going to take a piss in this thing'." Langly stopped fiddling with the suit and started the recording, pushing his glasses up with his wrist. "Now, what was it you wanted me to see?"  
  
"Do you remember what you said to me the first time we were at my place? About your relationship with walls?"   
  
Langly swallowed hard, a dazed smile edging onto his face. "Oh, you think so, do you?" He took a step back and stretched, leaning against the wall. "Good. Just remember the turn goes that way, or you're going to throw the laptop."

"Right. So. How does this work? I'm afraid my simple, monastic life hasn't really prepared me for doing this standing up," Reid quipped, with a nervous glance at the hardware. "Or with extra parts."  
  
"Lube in the drawer, assume you can't hurt me. I'll be pretty easy to move, as long as there's slack in the cable. If it goes tight, I'm going to push back. Two hands to open the snaps, because I'd rather not have any of them tear through the fabric, when it stretches." Langly's eyes gleamed with excitement. "You ready for this?"  
  
Nodding to reassure himself, Reid retrieved the bottle of lube and set it in front of the laptop, before he closed the last few inches between himself and Langly, leading with a kiss, noticing how easy that had become. What had become harder, though, was kisses anywhere but Langly's lips, and Reid hit the edge of the suit instead of Langly's neck.  
  
Langly chuffed in amusement. "Yeah, that's the downside. Still, _kisses_. What is this, a romance novel?"  
  
"It is utterly ridiculous to me that you'd have gotten this far without kisses," Reid protested, nudging Langly's chin up to nip under it.  
  
"He kisses his wife with that mouth. Probably better he never put it on me."  
  
"I’ve kissed you since you vomited. I'm pretty sure that invalidates your argument, even if we do have the benefit of time and coffee," Reid murmured, lips pressed against the corner of Langly's jaw.  
  
Langly laughed and brought a hand up to Reid's face, nudging him back far enough to look at. Words failed him -- less that he didn't know how to say what he meant than that he didn't know what he meant at all. A long, pensive look later, he pulled Reid back into another kiss, lusty and demanding.  
  
When Reid broke the kiss, nipping at Langly's jaw, again, Langly's hand pressed between his thighs. "Tell me how you want it, and it's all yours," Reid promised.  
  
"Hard, fast, like you're afraid we'll get caught," Langly breathed, squeezing gently.  
  
Reid paused. "The door _is_ locked, isn't it?"  
  
"Probably."  
  
Reid could feel Langly's smile against his cheek, and as he put a firm hand on Langly's shoulder, the hand cupping him through his jeans pulled back. A split second later, Langly's other hand collided with the wall, followed shortly by his chest, and by the time Langly caught his breath, Reid's hands were tracing the back of the crotch panel, carefully popping the snaps open.  
  
"You all right?" Reid asked, listening to Langly's breathing stutter.  
  
"Yeah, but you know what would be better? You shoving your dick up my ass so hard it makes me gag." The words didn't catch up to Langly until he heard them come out of his own mouth.  
  
"I'm not sure that's possible..." Reid sounded amused as he reached for the drawer he'd forgotten to take a condom out of.  
  
"Trust me. It is," Langly muttered, pressing his face against his forearm, glasses sliding back up and digging into the inner curve of his eye sockets, trying to construct a reality in which he hadn't just said that, as he listened to the quiet plastic and latex sounds behind him.  
  
"I really don't want to hurt you." Reid's hand traced Langly's spine and then settled at his hip.  
  
"Done this before. I _do_ know what I'm doing. Way too much lube and let me worry about the rest." Any other thoughts Langly might have had dissipated as Reid's fingers vanished from his hip, only to drag a slick line from just behind his balls to the very edge of his hole. A gasp preceded the next thought that passed through his head, snarled through clenched teeth. "If you don't put your dick in me right now, one of us is going to die horribly, and I make no promises about which one."  
  
"Pushy..." Reid teased, just behind Langly's ear, as he lined himself up and shoved in, slow and hard.  
  
Langly's back bowed, his head tipping back to press his open mouth around his wrist. He tried to remember how to breathe as the pleasure bloomed in his belly, coiling around his nerves like some serpentine vine teasing the inside of his skin. His legs tensed, spreading, rocking him up onto his toes, as his body remembered how this went. One of Reid's hands gripped his hip and the other cupped tightly over the closed front panel. Just that was almost too much, and Langly pulled that hand back to his hip, before he braced his forearm against the wall, again, with the other.  
  
After a few agonisingly slow thrusts, Reid moved one hand to the wall so Langly wouldn't be his only support as he picked up the pace, Langly's body twisting between him and the wall in exactly the way he'd hoped to capture.

Langly's eyes watered as Reid pressed into him, again and again, long, slow thrusts that were jarringly hard at one end and achingly hollow at the other. His back trembled as his entire consciousness was reduced to the twinge his body insisted was pleasure echoing through his bones. This wouldn't take long. It never had, like this. He could feel himself drool on the floor as he tipped his head down to get his wrist out of his mouth.  
  
"Harder," he panted. "Harder, faster, right fucking _now_. I'm so _close_ , and I want it, I want it, _I want it_!"  
  
Reid took a deep breath, trying to reconcile what he knew Langly was asking for with his own near-paralysing concerns about accidentally doing serious harm. He told himself Langly knew what he was doing, reminded himself that at least one of them had done this before, more than once, with no mention of injury to anything but pride. Nipping Langly's shoulder, through the suit, Reid let his body fulfil its own demands.  
  
"Yes," Langly hissed. "Yes, yes y--" He pressed his mouth against his wrist, again, as Reid slammed into him hard enough that he knew he'd have teeth marks on his arm. His body clenched, back bowing at some angle he'd probably regret later, retinal glitter exploding over the memories that flashed across his eyes.  
  
Reid's breath stuck in his throat as Langly squeezed him hard enough he saw stars -- spangles, real stars, the whole night sky unfurling around them -- and then a view of the two of them that couldn't be real, because he knew where he was standing. He could feel his body desperately chasing release, even as he watched himself rut into Langly's tight-stretched form, as he watched the perfect bliss on Langly's face.  
  
"You're so beautiful," Reid breathed against the back of Langly's shoulder. "Heart-stoppingly, mindblowingly --" And everything melted away, suffused in some sourceless golden light. A tiny, muffled sound caught on the inside of Reid's lips, as his hips jerked forward, legs debating whether to keep supporting him.  
  
Langly clung to the wall, sweat-soaked, a warm tingle in his extremities, too distracted to argue the point as the hand gripping his hip slowly uncurled and moved across his chest to settle on his shoulder. That wasn't how this was supposed to go, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered that Reid was terrible at standing up, in the aftermath. "You okay?"  
  
Reid nodded and pressed a kiss to Langly's shoulder for two long breaths that Langly could feel through the fabric, before he slowly eased himself out. Just as slowly, arms requiring far too much concentration as his body tried to find all the pieces of itself, he pushed himself back and tugged at Langly's shoulder, until they were face to face. A smile crept across his lips as he reached up and straightened Langly's glasses, thumb caressing Langly's cheek as he leaned in to press a small, sweet kiss to the corner of Langly's blissed smile.  
  
That was when Langly burst into tears, knees buckling as he slid down the wall. "I'm okay!" he insisted, palms out. "I'm fine!"  
  
Reid caught the laptop as it flew off the table after the suit end of the cable, but missed the lube, thankfully closed, which bounced off his upper arm as he dropped into a crouch. He set the laptop at Langly's side, and tucked himself back into the jeans he wore, before the cleaner of his hands stopped just short of Langly's knee. "You sure you're all right?"  
  
Langly nodded, trying to catch his breath. "It's not you," he panted, between two stuttered breaths, before he got them to slow, eyes still dripping. "That was incredible. But, you know how you get stuck in things going a certain way? That's not the way this ends, in my head." He held up a hand. "No, that's good. I'm pretty pissed off, still, about the way this ends, in my head. Shit, I'm a mess. Sorry. Too much. Not enough. I don't know. _Different_."  
  
"You're remembering Kimmy, aren't you?" Reid shifted to the side, off his feet and onto his hip, not quite touching Langly.  
  
"Yeah." Langly nodded, again, and barely managed to stop himself from wiping his nose on the still black-wrapped back of his wrist. He tipped his head back and snorted, instead. "Best fuck I ever had, not like that's saying much -- good enough I did a number on my reputation just to do it again. And again. And again again. And one more time for good measure. And you're ... not him. The same thing, and it's not even close. And it's like looking back on burnt diner coffee after a cup of that expensive shit Byers buys. I mean, I've had a lot of burnt diner coffee in my life. For a long time, I was pretty sure it was exactly what coffee was supposed to be."  
  
"There is absolutely nothing I can say here that's not going to sound arrogant and self-serving, by implication," Reid remarked after a few moments of awkward silence.  
  
Langly scoffed, pulling off his glasses and wiping the fog off them on the sleeve of the shirt Reid was wearing, before he put them back on. "Say it anyway. You deserve it. My god, you just ruined my fond memories of my entire sex life up to this point, with one goddamn kiss."  
  
"I kind of doubt that."  
  
"Okay, fine, but that was the last straw. You keep treating me like this is some trashy romance and you're the dashing hero, come to sweep me off my feet or something. I don't even know what to do with that. My brain just turned off. It wasn't even the kiss. It was that look you gave me. What the hell was that?"  
  
Reid shook his head and blinked. "It's not even romance. I'd say it's caring, but that's a loaded word, in this context, so let me use something a little more vulgar. It's just giving the slightest shit about you. As a friend. As a person I just had sex with. And if I get to be self-serving, I'll admit it. I like looking at you. I like kissing you." A short laugh slipped out before the next thought. "Romance takes a little more effort. Like... any. At all. Give me a couple of weeks to get over this case, and I'll show you romance."  
  
"Please don't." Langly leaned his head back against the wall. "I might spontaneously combust or something."  
  
"That's how the CIA's going to get you, you know. Death by hot federal romance."  
  
Langly cackled, shoving his glasses up with one hand to rub the outer corners of his eyes and shoving Reid's shoulder with his foot. "Fuck you."  
  
"If you can still get it up, after that, I'm game."  
  
Langly's eyes crossed as his glasses dropped back into place, and then a mischievous smile caught at the corners of his mouth. "You want the data from that, too?"  
  
Reid made an agonised sound. "Yes? But, there's only one suit between the two of us, because I don't think either of us would fit in or _wear_ Frohike's, and if we're going to do that, it should be both of us. I think we should do a full study. Multiple sessions." He paused, eyes gleaming impishly. "With enough data and a good writeup, maybe we can get funding from the NIH for further research."  
  
"I love it when you say shit like that." Langly laughed as he reached over and stopped the recording, scrolling back up through the end of the data, before he unplugged the suit from the machine. "Help me out of this thing, so I can put my hands all over you, and we'll see what I'm still good for. I'll order parts for another suit the next time I get out of bed. With you around, that might be next week."


	5. The Second Day

The first thing Langly noticed, when he woke, was that sitting down was going to be an interesting experience. The next was that Reid had already gotten up, leaving the dim light beside the bed turned on and aimed at yesterday's note, which now had another line under it on the page. He put on his glasses, trying to ignore the sinking dread in his chest. A note. Just a note and nothing more.  
  
'Can't sleep. Going to go raid the bookshelves in the back room. ~~Assuming I can stop looking at you long enough to get up.~~ '  
  
Langly's stomach rolled as the chest pain eased back, the momentary nausea of sudden relief, and he picked up yesterday's second set of clothes from the floor with his toes, not to lean over. That was the shirt he'd changed into after Frohike poured a Coke down the first one, but... what was he wearing, then? He pulled out the shirt he had on and glanced down. Right. The shirt Reid had been wearing. Reid had taken it off and handed it to him, once he'd gotten the suit mostly stripped off.  
  
And that had almost set him off again, which was stupid. It wasn't like no one ever handed him things he needed, before he asked. He lived with considerate... mostly considerate... people who knew him well enough to just... do that. But, never anyone he'd been banging, his treacherous mind filled in, as he pulled his trousers on and tried to run a hand through his hair. Which basically came down to Kimmy, who was the only person he'd even _seen_ after the first time, and that would've involved Kimmy not being an utter shit, which was really his core personality trait. He shook his head to clear it and went to brush his hair before leaving the room. It wouldn't do to walk out looking like the disaster he obviously was, after Reid had been so good to him. Whatever this was, he'd get over it. Probably just the stress from getting _shot at_ , really. Maybe the sudden weirdness of getting laid again, too. He'd be fine in a few days.  
  
He didn't find Reid in the back room, but voices from the kitchen led him onward, where he found Reid and Byers at the paper-covered end of the massive table, excitedly chattering over a stack of documents, a cup of coffee on Byers's side of the stack and what looked like jasmine tea on Reid's.  
  
"But, when you look at the local patterns overlaid on the larger geographical area--" Reid half turned in his seat and reached back to point to something on the map pinned up behind them, when he spotted Langly leaning against the fridge with a warm can of Jolt in one hand.  
  
"Don't let me stop you. What did he drag you into?" Langly crossed the room to join them at the table.  
  
"One of those ones Doggett threw us before we disappeared. I never liked the way this one ended -- there's something wrong with it, and Dr Reid sees it, too. There was never just one of them. There had to be at least three," Byers explained, leaning back to keep his coffee away from the documents, as he drank it.  
  
"A family." Langly shifted in his seat, discomfort flickering across his face.  
  
"Or even a colony. There's never more than three at once, but that doesn't mean there aren't more than three." Byers shrugged, coffee still in hand.  
  
"It's interesting that your first thought was a family, because you're probably right. It's a cooperative group, at the very least. We don't have much, but what's here doesn't suggest there's any territorial disputes or even sightings close enough to each other to form an immediate pattern. They knew what they were doing and how to do it together in a way that wouldn't make them obvious." Reid finished the gesture toward the map.  
  
"Why are we back on this?" Langly rubbed one of his eyes and re-seated his glasses. "Did that start up again?"  
  
"No, I think the others probably left the area and started somewhere else." Byers carefully set his coffee away from the piles of paper. "But, Dr Reid and I started talking, and this case came up in passing. It's one of the ones I was still carrying on that thumb drive, when ... things got ugly, so I printed it out so we could go through it."  
  
Reid straightened the papers in front of himself and then picked up his tea. While he was distracted, Byers raised his eyebrows at Langly and tipped his head at Reid, tapping four fingers on the edge of the table on the far side of a stack of paper, where Langly could see but Reid couldn't. Langly's eyes darted to Reid and then back to Byers perplexity and uncertainty writ large across his face.  
  
"What?"  
  
Langly suddenly realised he'd mistimed the last part of that exchange, and Reid was looking right at him. "Last night is still none of his business. Zero parts of it. None."  
  
"It's a good idea, Langly," Byers argued, heedless of the sudden left the subject had taken.  
  
Langly changed the subject much more firmly. "Can you still draw blood? I don't think you've used me for a pincushion since we got here."  
  
"You haven't been exposed to anything worse than day-old Chinese food, since we got here. We're not exactly out running after Bigfoot, Elvis, or the latest frightening turn in machine intelligence, any more."  
  
"I think proof of that would set Special Agent Sexy's mind at ease." After a moment too long, Langly laid his hand in the middle of the table, palm up, and after another moment's confusion, Reid took both the cue and the hand.  
  
"I'm almost entirely sure that's not the conversation the two of you were having, but I'm not going to ask, because I know when it's not my business." Reid picked up his tea, again, in his other hand. "I would definitely feel a little better about things, though. If anyone wants to go get them, my latest results are probably in." He glanced down at the bandages still wrapped around his forearms. "That much bleeding, under the circumstances, it's just better to be absolutely sure..."  
  
"I'll go look, but nothing's changed. Her Majesty would be directly up my ass, if you were sick."  
  
Reid cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.  
  
Langly leaned back, taking his hand back, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Haha. Not like that. ... Not that I'd mind."  
  
Squeezing his eyes shut, Reid made a disgruntled sound. "I'm never going to get that image out of my head."  
  
"You started it." Langly was entirely unapologetic. "What the hell time is it? Is Frohike still in bed?"  
  
Byers shook his head. "No, he's up front, speaking of getting up people's asses, ripping that photographer a new asshole."  
  
"Last month's Canadian yeti photographer? Good. If I never have to work with his images again, we'll all be better for it. I've taken better photos drunk."  
  
"The last time you took drunk yeti photos, didn't they turn out to be that waitress from the truck stop? The one you thought we didn't notice you watching, all night?"  
  
" _Maybe_." Langly huffed. "And they were still better than the shit this dink sent us. I was wasted with a disposable camera that I'm pretty sure I managed to sit on before we got any of the film developed, and at least you could tell what the hell was in the photos, even if they were a truck stop waitress, because my drunk ass was too drunk to see what was obvious to the camera."  
  
"You didn't just manage to sit on it. You barfed on it and then fell on it. We still wiped it off and took it to the nearest photomat." Byers looked amused. "How much did you even have? I've never seen you that drunk before or after."  
  
"Oh, I had about _I don't even fucking remember_ , because I stopped counting somewhere around six swigs of whatever that swill was Frohike was drinking and then woke up in the parking lot in a puddle of puke, completely sure I had a whole roll of yeti photos. And I was still drunk. I think I was still drunk the day after that, too." Langly shot Byers a dirty look, ankles crossing as his feet tucked back under the chair and his shoulders pulled in, defensively. "And you never saw me that drunk again because I never got that drunk again. I don't ever want to _be_ that drunk again."  
  
Reid tried to drown a laugh in his tea, and Langly jabbed a finger at him.  
  
" _He's_ a good time, that drunk. _I'm_ not allowed near a camera. Or people. Or parking lots."  
  
"Hey, at least you ended up on the right side of the camera," Reid pointed out with a hint of annoyance, mostly at himself.  
  
"For _me_. You looked pretty good in those pictures. I don't really look good in any pictures and being drunk is not ever going to be an improvement."  
  
"I looked _ridiculous_! She's going to be holding that over me until the end of time!" Horror settled onto Reid's face at the idea.  
  
"If by 'ridiculous' you mean 'gorgeous'," Langly scoffed, stretching his legs under the table, ankles still crossed. "You really looked like you were having a great time. It looks good on you."  
  
"I don't think enjoyment looks bad on anyone," Byers remarked, still trying to get the papers sorted back into the order they went in, instead of the order they'd ended up in for comparative purposes.  
  
"Except you," Langly teased, and got a sharp kick in the shin for his trouble. "Ow! It's fucking true, Byers! Every time you get excited about something it ends in disappointment and you go around looking like a kicked puppy for a week!"  
  
"Have you looked in a mirror at any point in the last twenty-something years, speaking of disappointment and kicked puppies?"  
  
Frohike appeared in the doorway, as the argument got louder. "Who's kicking the dog we don't have?"  
  
Reid rolled his eyes. "I think you've got a pair of puppies kicking each other. Are they always like this?"  
  
Frohike shook his head and made for the fridge. "Not usually. Langly'll slap at anything that gets too close, but he's been going for the throat, the last couple of days. This Vanity thing really got to him. He's not used to the strain, any more. It's been a lot of years for all of us."  
  
"I feel like getting shot at isn't a thing anyone should have to get used to. And actually _getting_ shot... I think that's right off the table." Reid absently rubbed a faint scar on the side of his neck.  
  
"You'd be surprised the shit we got used to." Frohike came across the room and opened a can of soda directly next to Langly's ear.  
  
Langly whipped around, one finger upraised. " _No!_ " he commanded, flustered, before snatching the can out of Frohike's hand. A moment later, he'd chugged the contents, squeezed the can, and crushed it with a quick slap onto the table.  
  
A moment passed and then another, before the outrage on his face twisted into something a little more seasick. "Somebody remind me not to do that."  
  
"Don't do that," Frohike drawled, leaning past Langly for the half-finished can of Jolt. "And stop yelling at Byers. It's you, not him. I promise."  
  
"I am not--!" Langly started, but stopped suddenly, as he realised Frohike was right. "What do you mean it's _me_?"  
  
"It's either getting shot at or getting laid, and getting laid usually makes people chill out. Byers is Byers. Nothing new, there. You, on the other hand..." Frohike spread his hands and gave Langly a pointed look. "Drink some decaf. Relax. Go make Special Agent Sex Object scream some more. Nothing's going on that we can't handle without you, for a few days."  
  
Reid looked like he might object to that characterisation, under almost any circumstances other than the ones at hand.  
  
"There's nothing fucking wrong wi--" The words stopped as Langly's eyes caught on Reid, and he remembered the night before.  
  
"Getting shot at, naked, with an untested new identity, and suddenly feds?" Byers counted the points off on his fingers and gave Langly a look that suggested the conclusion should be obvious. "Go take a hot bath, or something. If anything happens, we'll let you know. Chinese, tonight?"  
  
"Shit." Langly groaned and tipped his head back, shoving his hands up under his glasses to rub his eyes. "Fine. Chinese. I'll get over it."  
  
Frohike patted his shoulder. "You always do."


	6. Chapter 6

"They really care about you," Reid pointed out, from where he sat behind Langly in the ridiculously large bath -- one he could fully extend his legs in, possibly even lie down in, given how far down Langly had slumped. As it was, he kept one leg bent to keep from sliding down.  
  
"I really do have to stop yelling at Byers," Langly admitted, after a moment, tipping his head back onto Reid's shoulder. " _None_ of this shit bothered me nearly this much when it happened. Suddenly, I almost get my ass shot off, and I'm bitchy about it? I mean, I'm usually pretty bitchy after I almost get my ass shot off, but that's more about _immediate_ concerns."  
  
"Relationships. You keep going off about _relationships_." Reid moved his elbows off the back of the bath, wrapping his scab-spotted arms around Langly and the wet shirt that separated them. "It's not getting shot at. It's _me_."  
  
"Don't be stupid." Langly squinted up at the side of Reid's face. "You're good. Getting shot at is bad."  
  
"I'm serious. The closest thing to a sexual relationship you've had was Kimmy Belmont, and that was... _you said_ it was based in rivalry. Now, you're doing things that should be repeats of that, and it's not working out that way."  
  
"Because you're not two gallons of snide narcissism in a pint bottle? It's an improvement." Langly rested a hand on Reid's knee.  
  
"You said it last night. It's _different_. And right now, it's different _and_ in your home. In the room you sleep in, even."  
  
"Different and in my ass, and I love it," Langly retorted, refusing to take any of this seriously.  
  
"The point is, if you need me to go, so you can deal with this, there's still a hotel room I could be in. I've slept. I'm safe to drive. I don't ... have to be here."  
  
Langly groaned and sat up, untangling himself from Reid, until he could twist around to look at him. "Do you want to go? Because if you want to go, you should go, but you should do it carefully. Make sure someone knows where you are and where you're supposed to end up, just in case something goes wrong. But, if you're really asking me if I want you to leave, you might as well be asking me if I want to stand naked in a field in Iowa in the middle of the night and wait for the targeting systems to kick in. By which I mean no, in case that didn't come through."  
  
"Then you have to stop yelling at Byers. Frohike's right; it's not about him."  
  
"Frohike's right, which is why I'm in here taking a hot bath with a hot fed," Langly reminded him.  
  
"Hear me out." Reid wondered if this was at all a good decision, trying to have a serious conversation while naked, with the subject of his insights between his thighs. Probably not, he thought, and did it anyway. "You talked to Kimmy, what, three days ago? Four? And then you threw up. Somewhere in there, I told you I was afraid you were going to get killed, and you called our relationship a garbage barge, and then we got shot at in a bizarre twist of fate by another stalker with a poor grip on rational behaviour, which is my baggage, not yours, but you dodged the very literal bullet... because of Kimmy Belmont. Every fight you've picked with Byers has been about Susanne. Last night, you cried about Kimmy. Three times. There's a pattern, here."  
  
"There's a pattern anywhere, if you look for it hard enough," Langly huffed, turning back around and slouching against Reid's chest. He knew Reid was ... if not right, at least in the vicinity of it, but he wasn't admitting anything until he figured out what to do with it.  
  
"With the limited information I have, this is the most reasonable connection I've been able to make between a set of otherwise disparate points, and it's definitely not a stretch." Reid took Langly's hand, under the water, rubbing between the knuckles with his thumb. "Just consider it."  
  
Langly made a contented sound and stretched. "Maybe. Are you going to keep doing that?"  
  
"If you want me to."  
  
"Mmm. The other one too?" Langly wiggled his fingers.  
  
"You're just as intense about your relaxation as everything else, aren't you?" Reid chuckled quietly and caught Langly's other hand.  
  
"Hey, I've got the blanket in the dryer, okay, and after this, I'm going to go get it, so we can spend a few hours wrapped up in fluffy warm comfort. It's not something I do often, but put me in the right mood and you'll need space lasers to get me out of it. Or a really good idea that I absolutely have to get up and do something about before I forget it." Langly sighed and tipped his head back onto Reid's shoulder, again. "I love the idea of relaxing, but I'm not good at the implementation. The blankets cool off and I get bored. Or I come to my senses and realise I've been wrapped up in blankets with a giant cup of hot chocolate... working on something I said I was taking a break from. So, yeah, I just kind of cannonball into it and hope I get enough before I get distracted by something more interesting."  
  
Reid laughed, a bright sound that reflected back off the tiles. "I can't do it, either. I can't just walk away from a problem."  
  
"Oh, good. It's not just me. Well, us. Kind of. Byers actually sleeps. Not well, but he does."  
  
"Sleep? Isn't that the thing that supposedly happens if you run out of coffee?" Reid teased.  
  
"See? You get it." Something snapped into place in Langly's mind and he fell perfectly still, not even breathing, while it settled. "That's it, isn't it?"  
  
"I don't follow."  
  
"Because I'm wrong. Nevermind." Langly shook his head, tangling his hair against Reid's shoulder. "That's not what goes there, not all of it."  
  
"Explain it to--" Reid glanced around and realised there was no duck. "Explain it to me like you would to a rubber duck. Seriously, no duck?"  
  
"You don't have one, either!" Langly retorted, huffing.  
  
"I'm not a programmer. Garcia has one, but she also has a Hello Kitty and a squeaky rubber unicorn." Reid refrained from mentioning that he explained things to the hypothetical ghost on the other side of a half-finished game of chess.  
  
Langly flexed his hands, stretching his fingers as Reid kneaded his palms. "Okay, so... If we assume that you're right -- that I'm suddenly getting bitchy with Byers because I'm getting laid, which I may still dispute -- there's a reason. Like, that's not a reason by itself."  
  
"Distal cause, not proximal cause."  
  
"That. So, the question is what's in the middle. And for a minute, I thought that was it -- I say weird shit and you just ... _get it_. Except I already have that. I say weird shit to Byers and Frohike all the time. And don't tell me it's because I'm not screwing them -- I did give Byers about fifteen minutes of drunken contemplation, one night, but then I passed out and sobered up. I _was_ screwing Kimmy. Or ... close enough. The only reason I finished sentences around Kimmy -- well, two reasons -- either he was _wrong_ or he was just being an obstinate shit and making me say it. Point is, we had even more thoughts in common, once we got the subject defined. We did good work, because we didn't have to explain it."  
  
"Not to belabour the point, but last night was because I'm _not_ Kimmy," Reid reminded him.  
  
"Similar, but still critically different. _You're_ not an asshole."  
  
Reid cleared his throat. "Some people who have known me longer might beg to differ."  
  
"Different kind of asshole. Neutral good, not neutral evil." Langly paused, stretching his toes. "That's not as bad as it sounds. I just mean he was a lot more self-interested than interested in the greater good. The world could go fuck itself, as long as he was turning a profit."  
  
"Some people might argue that I'm lawful good."  
  
"Some people have obviously never seen past the badge."  
  
Reid laughed. "I never said I was one of them."  
  
"Of course you're not. You argued for neutral, yourself." Langly tipped his head back a little further and nipped at the corner of Reid's jaw. Then he paused. "That. What the hell is that?"  
  
"You're the one doing it. You tell me."  
  
"I wouldn't be asking if I could figure it out myself." Langly huffed. "Besides, you do it, too. You're not into hugs, but you keep touching me. You go in for an awful lot of full-body contact for someone who doesn't go for that shit."  
  
"In my defence, I said I was working on that." Reid pulled his other knee up. "I have regrets about choices I didn't make, somewhere else, and I'd rather have memories than regrets."  
  
"Memories of what, though? No, I take that back. I'm really not that stupid, I just play it on the internet." Sighing, Langly let his eyes fall closed. "You said it last night -- reassurance that I'm real, and I know that was a really specific thing, but I think that's it. For me, I mean. I know _they're_ real. It's hard to forget. But, you're..." He laughed. "Different. Ethereal? I keep expecting to wake up. You're pretty far outside my expectations on any number of levels. And this whole thing has just been collision after collision. Literally, too. How many times have you hit the floor?"  
  
"Probably too many, if we're honest." Reid sounded amused at that revelation.  
  
"And you're not pissed about it. About any of it." Langly picked his head up and leaned to squint sideways at Reid. "You're not, right? I didn't miss that?"  
  
"There's exactly one thing I could've been angry about, in all of this, and there were more important things to be than angry, at the time. We dealt with it. I just wanted to know you hadn't been shot." Reid's voice cracked and he cleared his throat as if nothing had happened.  
  
Langly subtly changed the subject. "Okay, but I kissed you, speaking of completely literal collisions that ended on the floor."  
  
"Surprised, not angry. Panicked, even. Embarrassed? Completely. But, definitely not angry." Reid ducked his head, wet skin catching against Langly's cheek. "Not actually the first time I've been spontaneously kissed by an attractive stranger, during a case, in some incident involving a fall."  
  
"Does this shit just... happen to you?"  
  
Reid swallowed a laugh. "We're not up to three. It's not a thing, yet."  
  
Langly didn't even try not to laugh.  
  
"So, not to ruin the mood, but what is it about Byers and Susanne that bothers you so much?"  
  
"Everything." Langly sighed and took his hands back from Reid to splash water on his face. "Susanne is why we even know Byers. Kind of. Mostly. I sure as hell wouldn't have been caught dead talking to the narc otherwise. She was some kind of black ops chemist, so deep I'm honestly terrified to go looking for her again, because I've _seen_ what comes to clean up after her. We helped her disappear for real, the last time. But, she lied to Byers, used him, almost got us all killed, and he fell in love with her, in the process because _what the hell is wrong with you, Byers_. And then she came back! Or we came back. Byers spent like ten years looking for her, before that time in Vegas. And she's there with some other guy, but then she's right back to Byers, even before the other guy got killed. And then we all almost got shot again, I wound up getting drugged along with a bunch of other people, and fucking _Jimmy_ straight up got killed. She's a murder waiting to happen, if not a mid-scale genocide. The number of people who have died because of her work -- not from it, just  _because_ of it... I know we're past ten, that I  _know about_. She's two hundred percent full of shit at least sixty percent of the time, and I know Byers is so in love with her he's choking on it, but I can't help but think she's just going to keep exploiting that. At least he had the sense to stay with us, instead of run off with her, when she offered, not that I'd have blamed him, at the time. Honestly, I was touched, but I thought he was an idiot. But, now? I'm pissed off _for_ him, because this is actually bullshit, and I'm pissed _at_ him because he can't see it -- he's never been able to see it, even when he's up to his neck in it." He paused for breath. "And I'm pissed at me, because I'm about to go find her for him."  
  
"Or you could just... not look for her," Reid suggested. "He doesn't know you were planning to."  
  
"No, I really can't. I can't do this in front of him and not at least try." Langly leaned forward, folding up until his ankles crossed and his knees rested against Reid's, and splashed more water on his face. "It's not right. It's really not."  
  
"Next horrible point for consideration: you're re-evaluating your own past relationships, right now. You said you're getting 'bitchy' about things that never bothered you before. Are you re-evaluating Byers's relationship with Susanne under the same criteria?"  
  
"Oh, shit," Langly groaned, head between his knees. " _Maybe_." After a moment, he glanced back over his shoulder at Reid. "Are you profiling me?"  
  
With the most innocent expression he could muster, Reid shrugged. " _Maybe_."  
  
Langly shook his head and blinked a few times, before he leaned back against Reid, yet again. As his legs stretched back out, Reid's followed them down.  
  
"And while I'm profiling you, you slept with the yeti waitress, didn't you?"  
  
"What the _hell_?" Langly almost sat up again in shock.  
  
"Byers said he noticed you watching her, you both agree you got unbelievably drunk... Your reactions were suggestive -- the emphasis on how drunk you were and then changing the subject."  
  
"Only if your definition of 'slept with' doesn't include any sleeping or even getting horizontal. And your timing's off."  
  
"Before." Reid smiled as the pieces fell into place. "Because you were watching her hoping she wouldn't come over and say something in front of Byers and Frohike."  
  
"Bingo. You're good at this."  
  
"That's what they pay me for." Reid wrapped his arms around Langly again. "And you got drunk because you were nervous and drinking to have something to do with your hands. Also after."  
  
"Close enough. Definitely a little freaked out -- a lot freaked out. But, it wasn't my hands I was worried about. I figured if I got smashed I'd be embarrassing enough to keep her away. Like the whole thing wasn't already that bad. Or maybe I was hoping I'd be too drunk to care if she did come over and say something. Something inevitably shitty, at that point. Frohike thought I was drinking so I'd have the guts to ask her out. He put the flask in my hand in the first place. For a while, I was scared he was going to try to _help_. Then I threw up, and everything was cool. Except I didn't throw up enough, so I just kept getting drunker. I really don't remember a whole lot besides being glad I was sitting between Frohike and actually getting up and then an awful lot of puke." Langly laughed nervously. "God, that whole night. I made an ass out of myself with her -- I don't know if I ever even knew her name -- and then I made a drunken ass of myself in front of an entire truck stop, in self-defence."  
  
"Was it worth it?"  
  
" _No_." Langly laughed. "Was it worth it? Was -- This isn't just me looking back on it. It wasn't worth it _at the time_. What was that, two minutes in a truck stop bathroom, during which I absolutely embarrassed myself? No part of that was worth waking up drunk and covered in vomit, with gravel stuck in my face. But, I still say those photos were amazing, considering the circumstances."  
  
"Do you still have them?" Reid knew that was a dangerous question.  
  
Langly shook his head. "I might, if I'd scanned them, but the technology was crap and I wasn't wasting drive space on _good scans_ of something we didn't need. Lost them with everything else. _Everything_. We had to fight to keep what we'd had in our pockets, going in. Like money was going to replace a decade of effort and information. Am I still bitter? Hell yes, I'm still bitter. But, I'm also alive."  
  
"I definitely like you alive. I feel like you being dead might have put an irreparable crimp in the relationship, right from the start."  
  
Another laugh from Langly. "That's one way to put it. Still surprised the disappointment I keep in my pants hasn't put a crimp in the relationship."  
  
"I haven't been disappointed by anything you keep in your pants, but I also haven't been going through your pockets," Reid quipped.  
  
"Ninety seconds or less, and usually a lot less? Really?" Langly drawled, rubbing his face with wet hands.  
  
Reid cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably. "You know that turns me on, right?"  
  
"You know you don't have to make me feel better about it, right?" Langly snapped, smacking his nose on Reid's chin as he turned his head.  
  
"What?" Reid blinked in confusion. "I'm not... I'm completely serious. I like watching you have a good time. I like knowing that I'm giving you a good time. And you make it so clear. I love that. Watching you -- _feeling_ you... My legs are going to start shaking, just thinking about it, and I'm not even standing up. And the fact that I can give you that, and you still want _more_? It's incredible. It's powerful. Just the first one, and I want to _give you_ my body, however you want it. It takes a _lot_ to put something like that in my head, at this point in my life. It's-- I'm-- Give me your hand." He pulled his hips back and pressed Langly's hand between them. "Now do you believe me?"  
  
Langly twisted around once again, eyes following his hand, first and then drifting up to Reid's face, counting a scant handful of obvious scars along the way. "Take me to bed."  
  
"Go get the blankets out of the dryer." A delighted gleam lit Reid's eyes.  
  
"God, yes." Langly looked Reid up and down one more time before he kicked the release for the drain and threw himself out of the bath, stripping off his wet shirt and tossing it in the sink. "I'll get the blankets. You throw clean sheets on the bed."  
  
"Consider it done."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After tomorrow's chapter, I'm probably taking a few days off so I can do the things people actually pay me for, and then I'll be back!


	7. Chapter 7

They lay curled together, heads on a single pillow, the dryer-warmed blanket tucked tight around them and pulled up to their ears, lips parted and pressed together around shared breath. Langly purred warmly into the kiss, winding one leg around Reid's, ankle caught between bony shins.  
  
As the kiss broke, Reid tipped his head down, voice barely more than a whisper in the sliver of space between them. "I know we have these few days, before my apartment stops being a crime scene, and I don't know what happens after that. But, I want to spend as much of this time as I can touching you, listening to you. I want enough memories that nothing can take all of them. I want to write you indelibly into my mind, and I know that's not possible -- god, do I know -- but I want to try. Of all the things that can be taken from me, I don't want this to be one of them. I don't want you to be one."  
  
"Weirdly, that might actually protect you from the scary CIA drugs, at least a little. Or protect me from the combination of you and the drugs. Though, I'd honestly put more faith in any base resistance coming from you just being nuts." Langly paused. "I mean that in the best way possible."  
  
Reid shook his head. "No. Don't. You might be right, but don't bet your life on it." He recited a case number and then another. "Read them, and you'll understand. Lesser drugs have been used to great effect in causing people to kill their own families. I saw it fail _once_ , used against an unsuspecting victim -- he killed himself, instead. Two members of my team saw through it, when it mattered, but... don't put your faith in me, in my training, in my memories. I _didn't_ see through it. Not soon enough to matter."  
  
"You still didn't actually kill anyone, though," Langly reminded him. "You didn't even try. And you didn't forget anyone who mattered. You lost like two days. I've been hit in the head worse than that. You don't give yourself enough credit. Not that I had any intention of relying on your entirely theoretical resistance to chemicals I haven't been anywhere near in a decade. I have some secrets I'm going to keep that way, for my health. And yours. But, trust me, if you even have second thoughts, I have more than enough time to save us both."  
  
"That's oddly reassuring. I think that's the only time I've ever been reassured by someone promising to kick my ass."  
  
"I never said anything about kicking your ass," Langly pointed out, settling one hand firmly on Reid's ass. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing, at least some of the time."  
  
"That's a hint, isn't it." Reid's hand slid down from Langly's shoulder to squeeze his elbow, and he turned his head to bury his face in the pillow. "Sorry. The only murders I've committed have been killing the mood."  
  
Langly tipped his head back not to laugh straight into Reid's ear. "Hey, at least it hasn't killed your sense of humour. But, you might want to add my _ass_ to the list of things you murdered. Which is actually my fault, and I know it, so don't start. You're just going to have to find another thirty-second thrill to give me for your own amusement."  
  
"Amusement doesn't even begin to cover it. I read the dictionary for fun, and I'm having trouble describing what that does to me."  
  
"So don't describe it. Get there and free-associate. Assuming you can remember what words are, at that point."  
  
"Pretty sure I actually tried that last time, but I got so caught up in just... seeing you. That was the data I wanted, by the way. You're breathtaking, when you want me." Reid rubbed the bridge of his nose against Langly's chin, nipped under it. "And not just then. The first time I saw you -- you knew what you looked like. You set that room up that way on purpose, right from the start, from the raised floor, to the way the monitors make a perfect bust cut when you stand, to the angle of the lights. That was some Wizard of Oz shit, and you know it."  
  
"Yeah, well, you're definitely behind the curtain, now." Langly laughed again. "How about paying some attention to the man?"  
  
Reid threw his weight and knocked Langly under him, pushing himself up to take in the view of Langly with his throat bared.  
  
"Can you... just... back to the side a little? I'm laying on my hair." Langly sounded a bit strained.  
  
"Sorry!" Reid leaned to the side, giving Langly the space to pull a shoulder up and wrap his hair around his wrist, before settling back down.  
  
"Thanks." Langly smiled awkwardly. "The one downside. Sometimes you catch it in things."  
  
"So, now that you've been freed from the merciless confines of your own hair, what kind of attention should I show you? The affectionate kind, obviously, but what have you been missing out on?" Reid reached down and ran a teasing finger along Langly's thigh.  
  
"If I've been missing out, how the hell would I know?" Langly scoffed, trying to fold his arms without getting caught on Reid's. "What's been missing in your sex life?"  
  
"The sex," Reid deadpanned, and then tried again. "Obviously, a hot blond with a brilliant mind and a compelling body, but I've got that, now."  
  
"You keep calling me hot and I'm going to start thinking you have a concussion." Langly shot Reid a sceptical look. "I'll give you brilliant, though. That's never been in question."  
  
"I think you lack a certain familiarity with your virtues."  
  
"Yeah, I'll give you a familiarity with my virtue."  
  
"I wish you would..."  
  
Langly looked away, apparently considering the bedside table. "Your objection was the ancient condoms. I'm not going to have better until tomorrow, so maybe your twelve seconds of disappointment should wait another day."  
  
"I'm willing to bet it'll survive twelve seconds. I could quote statistics, but I think I've done enough killing the mood for one day." Reid cleared his throat. "Besides, we've already established that's not going to be disappointment."  
  
"Might be, when you can't fuck me raw, because I'm already raw from last night's escapades in ' _use a thicker lube for vertical, genius_ '. I'm fucking brilliant, but clearly not _that_ smart." Langly still looked unconvinced, leg bending slightly to rub his heel anxiously against the sheets.  
  
"Common sense is always the first thing to go. The second is the sense of time. 'How old is this coffee? I'll drink it anyway,' and so on. We're not going to talk about how many times I threw up mid-flight, after that, because there are much better things to discuss, like the fact that we're both sufficiently intelligent and creative to come up with something that's not going to cause any more damage. To either of us."  
  
Langly's foot stopped moving. "No blowjobs."  
  
"I'm glad we're on the same page." Reid nodded, eyes squeezing shut in reflexive disgust. "You piss with that; there's no way it's going in my mouth, nor would I ask the reverse."  
  
"I vomit with my mouth, and you'll still kiss that." Langly knew he was probably shooting himself in the foot, but the words were already out.  
  
"The inside of your mouth is not only easy, but culturally common, to clean on a regular basis," Reid pointed out, after a split-second's consideration.  
  
"You've put a lot of thought into this."  
  
"In the last ten seconds or so. Sometimes you have to seriously examine your assumptions, in depth, and I've come to the conclusion I'm comfortable keeping this one."  
  
"In depth. In ten seconds," Langly scoffed.  
  
"Haven't we already established I like that sort of thing?" Reid leaned down for a slow, teasing kiss, a warm sound escaping him as Langly's arms wrapped around him, pulling him closer.  
  
"I think you were about to prove to me that you like that sort of thing. Which would make you number two of six."  
  
"Kimmy's the other one?" Reid guessed.  
  
" _No_." Langly recoiled, head sinking into the pillow. "Kimmy didn't give a shit. Outside wall of a cheap motel, sitting on a breaker box -- I can tell you that, but not her name. Her complaint was that most guys took too long. That went well enough I was almost sad we were leaving in the morning, except the part where I really didn't want to hear it from Frohike. I think she also _liked_ that I was leaving."  
  
"Well, I like that you're staying."  
  
"That's a first." Langly raised a hand to Reid's face, tracing the line of cheek into jaw. "I like it. That you like it. I like that you like it. English is my first language, can you tell?"  
  
"Thought you might approve." Reid finally moved his leg out from between Langly's, straddling his hips, instead. "So... what are the chances we're actually going to do this, instead of talking around it, all day?"  
  
"Right now? Pretty slim," Langly admitted, with a nervous laugh. "I can do this to _myself_. _You_ make me very nervous."  
  
" _Me_? Why?" Reid looked genuinely confused.  
  
"You have to remember, Kimmy's the only other _man_ I've been with, and the first time was like having my guts ripped out my ass. Utterly blew my mind, in the end, but there was at least a minute and a half of serious, compelling regret, first, and I really don't want to put you through that. I mean, I'm obviously going to take more time with you than he took with me if you added up all six times, but I just... you deserve someone who knows what they're doing."  
  
"Maybe, but I want you."  
  
Langly's eyelids fluttered, his lips tightening, and his hand dropped from Reid's cheek, palm pressing into the corner of one eye.  
  
"I trust you. You'll listen to me. Maybe you don't know what you're doing, but you know that. And that makes two of us." Reid pressed a kiss to the middle of Langly's forehead. "Besides, we're geniuses. If we screw this up, it'll be spectacular."  
  
Langly burst out laughing. "Oh god, please don't let me do anything that's going to force Byers into service as a medic."  
  
Reid caught the laugh. "At least it'd be memorable."  
  
With Reid still sniggering and wheezing against his shoulder, Langly eventually caught his breath and stopped laughing long enough to get a sentence out. "Pass me the lube, and I'll show you what I like." He nudged Reid. "Quick, before I freak out again."  
  
Reid pushed himself up, coughing as he tried to stop laughing, and reached for the drawer with the lube. Pressing the bottle into Langly's hand, he finally managed a serious expression. "Thank you."  
  
"It's a little early for that," Langly muttered, taking a deep breath. "I should probably be behind--"  
  
" _No_."  
  
Langly closed his eyes and curled his fingers, contemplatively. "I was thinking so I could see, but you're right. I don't actually need to see, and that's a much better angle."  
  
"Not my first reason, but let's go with that."  
  
Langly knew better than to ask. Instead, he splashed lube into his palm, tilting it down his fingers, and then wrapped his hand around Reid's half-interested shaft. "Trust me. You need to relax, first. You need to want this with more than just your brain."  
  
Reid nodded, lowering his shoulders to bury his face against Langly's neck. "I do trust you."  
  
Langly's hands caressed and teased Reid's body, sticking to things he'd figured out Reid liked, paying attention to the way Reid kissed him, the sounds of Reid breathing. At the first half-voiced sound of desire, he pressed his knuckles against the flesh just behind Reid's balls and kneaded gently, wringing a shivery groan out of Reid.  
  
"Please..." Reid breathed dizzily against the corner of Langly's jaw.  
  
"Not yet." Langly's other hand stroked Reid's side, soothingly, as his fingers continued their slow work, firm pressure and gentle caresses. "Recognise this? It's entirely your fault I know how to do this."  
  
"Point made." Reid panted, wondering how long it would take before he overloaded and dissociated entirely. The feeling was incredible, but the intensity seemed to lean that way, instead of toward orgasm. "I'm a tease. I concede."  
  
"Not the point I was making, but I'm thrilled you've finally seen the light." Langly chuckled, hands still busy.  
  
"Langly, _stop_. Do something else, _right now_." Reid could feel himself teetering on the edge of somewhere he didn't want to be.  
  
'Stop' was all it took. Langly froze. "What is it, so I don't do it again?"  
  
Reid shook his head. "I don't know. Ask me later. Try something else." He pushed himself up and offered an apologetic look and a small kiss. "I still want you. I just can't handle _that_."  
  
Langly's fingers unfolded as he moved his hand forward again, to curl around more familiar flesh. "Better?"  
  
Reid nodded, flicking his tongue against Langly's lips before sinking into a heated kiss, breathing in time with the hand stroking him, until the kiss became suffocating. He panted, mouthing at the edge of Langly's jaw, grinding against Langly's hand. "Now. Do it now, before I--"  
  
The rest of the sentence was lost in a gasp at a sudden flash of cold lube. The bottle snapped shut with an audible click, and then Langly's other hand moved past the first to catch the drips, fingers paying the barest attention to the flesh he'd been warned off, before the pad of one finger pressed gently across Reid's entrance, lingering at the edges, teasing the rim, smearing the lube back up to where it was needed.  
  
"If you're trying to make sure I only last twelve seconds after you get it in, I'm pretty sure it's working," Reid hissed against Langly's neck, trying to hold himself back without accidentally turning himself off completely -- a thin line and one he didn't like the wrong side of.  
  
"I'm trying to make sure I have at least twelve seconds before you break my nose." A nervous laugh slipped out of Langly. "Relax for me?"  
  
One finger slid in with nearly no resistance and Langly followed it almost immediately with another, curling both subtly down.  
  
"Oh my god." Reid's entire body tensed, suddenly, his hands clenching in the sheets and catching Langly's hair.  
  
"You all right? You want me to stop?"  
  
Reid didn't quite manage to answer the question. "That is the first time I've ever been touched there in a non-medical context, and it's a little... ah... strange? I'm really not sure how I feel about that, just yet."  
  
"Better than I expected this to go," Langly admitted, his other hand slowly caressing the flagging flesh that lay against his palm. "Just give it a minute, and you'll figure out what to do with it."  
  
Reid nodded and took a few deep breaths. None of the sensations were painful or upsetting, but they weren't things his body had been expecting in light of those that preceded them, and he took the warnings issued by his insides with a grain of salt and a hint of amusement. No matter what his nerves thought about it, he knew exactly what was actually happening.  
  
"Here, stay tight like that a second," Langly suggested, as something occurred to him. He flexed his fingers a few times, tiny motions that bounced his knuckles against the muscle clamped just behind them.  
  
The first thing Reid felt was the pleasure lancing up his back like twin bolts of lightning, settling across his arms like electrostatic ghosts of wings. The second thing he felt was his eyes rolling back. "Please, Langly, _please_..."  
  
And that was more than Langly had hoped for, as Reid began rocking his hips between the hand beneath him and the fingers inside him, clenching tight on the way down and relaxing on the way back up. "Do you want it just like this? We can just do _this_. You like it, I like it... I am completely comfortable fingerfucking you until you come all over me."  
  
Reid shook his head vehemently. "More," he demanded, knowing it was stupid to try to do this all at once, but determined to do it anyway, because what was the point of genius, if not to ignore common sense.  
  
"Are you absolutely sure about this?" Langly asked, the edge of nervousness back in his voice.  
  
"I want your penis inside me." Reid clamped down hard. "How much anatomical detail do you want? I want to feel your pulse throbbing against me like I can feel your knuckles. I want to feel every spurt of ejaculate leave your body, when I give you an orgasm you will never forget."  
  
"Ahh... That-- I'm--" Langly's hands stilled as he blinked, blinked again. "You have just murdered any arguments I may have had."  
  
"Crime of passion," Reid panted, rolling his hips. "Voluntary manslaughter, at most."  
  
"With a sentence of getting me a condom, because both my hands are busy encouraging your depraved lusts."  
  
Reid retrieved one from the still-open drawer, tearing open the packet with his teeth and slipping the hand holding it down between them, so Langly would only need one hand to get it on.  
  
"Hold that." Langly dropped his own latex-wrapped dick in Reid's hand so he could find the lube, again. "I already dripped all over both of us, and I have at least one working brain cell left."  
  
"Thank you." A tiny smile flicked across Reid's lips.  
  
"Don't thank me yet," Langly muttered, leading Reid's hips down with a quick tap of the fingers inside him as he awkwardly splashed lube into Reid's hand. "Okay, I'm going to take my fingers out, and it's going to feel horrible. Follow the fingers. Push out just a little. I'll do this slow."  
  
Reid swallowed and nodded, eyes closed as his hand stroked lube onto Langly. He hissed at the sudden feeling of emptiness, the twinge that ran all the way up into his chest, but suddenly his hand was empty, too. And that felt much larger pressed where it was, now, than it had in his hand.  
  
"Just keep breathing. The first bit's going to be bad, but on the bright side, I might not make it all the way through that, so..." Another nervous laugh from Langly. "Assuming I do, we'll do a little at a time, because I know you don't want this all at once, even if you think you do. Trust me. Not the first time. I made that mistake so you don't have to."  
  
"I want you. I trust you." Reid nipped at Langly's ear. "Stop talking and put it in me."  
  
Langly did as he was told, burying himself in Reid just deep enough to get past the hard part. Reid clamped down around him with a ragged sound of surprise and possibly pain, but Langly's back arched at the sudden crush, spots of light swimming in his vision as he grit his teeth and tried to focus on how much that actually _hurt_.  
  
"You okay? Do we need to stop?" he ground out.  
  
Reid's voice was a raw growl against his ear. "Don't you fucking dare stop."  
  
"Need you to let up just a little, then."  
  
A few slow breaths and Langly pushed a little further in, pulling Reid down onto him as his legs tensed too hard to be of use.  
  
"Oh, please, yes--" Reid breathed, hips picking up the rhythm from earlier.  
  
"Oh, shit," Langly swore as his back tightened, pulling his head back, canting his hips, as Reid rode him. Four thrusts, he thought, and then everything went nuclear white. As his vision came back in splotches, he realised he hadn't slipped out, yet, and Reid was still clenched tight around him, making desperate sounds.  
  
He wedged a hand between them, dragging it through the puddle on his belly that Reid was definitely in the process of adding to, and then wrapped his hand around Reid's probably achingly-hard flesh, to judge from the sounds he was making. The next sound was loud enough that Langly was pretty sure he wouldn't be hearing in that ear for a while, and the puddle expanded in a hot splash that reached up his chest as Reid throbbed against his fingers.  
  
Langly could feel the next shift in Reid's breathing, the sudden stuttered, jerky breaths. "You okay?"  
  
Reid nodded against Langly's shoulder. "Yeah." His voice cracked.  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"I'm fine. That doesn't even-- I'm amazing." Reid sniffed wetly, followed by a broken laugh. "My entire body has just declared a mutiny."  
  
"Are you--" Langly pulled his head to the side and tried to look at Reid. "Are you dripping snot in my hair?"  
  
This time, Reid's laugh was almost believable. "Maybe."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's my _fucking birthday_! So, late chapter, but totally worth it. Happy birthday to me, I've been waiting for the opportunity to write this. ~~And no copyediting, because I am so behind schedule.~~ And now I have to _go the fuck to work_. Next chapter is at least a few days out, possibly as many as ten, depending on how long it takes to do the thing I actually get paid for.


	8. Chapter 8

"You feeling a little more like yourself and less like a rabid bitch?" Frohike asked as Langly stepped into the kitchen, barefoot, hair still dripping wet from the shower.  
  
"Fuck you," Langly groaned, flicking a dismissive hand at Frohike, as he went to investigate the bag of Chinese food Byers was unpacking.  
  
"Not in a million years," Frohike replied. "Not if you paid me."  
  
"Is Dr Reid sleeping it off?" Byers asked, noticing it was just the three of them.  
  
"He'll be a minute." Langly kicked a chair out and sat down. He knew damn well what was taking Reid so long, and he had no intention of talking about it. He wished he'd had the sense to mention that unfortunate side-effect to Reid, but it wasn't anything serious, just a little uncomfortable. "We've only been gone a couple of hours. Miss him already?"  
  
"Mild concerns, actually."  
  
"Byers, if I broke him, you'd be the first to know. He's fine. Can't a man take a piss around here, without it becoming a matter of public inquiry?"  
  
"Not after the amount of noise the two of you were making." Frohike brought over a trivet and a pot of tea. "We were making bets on whether that was a porno or a horror movie, with that much screaming."  
  
"He was not that loud," Langly grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest and his ankles under the table. "I would know. That was right next to my ear."  
  
"We didn't design this place to handle sound properly," Byers said, quietly. "There's an echo in the laundry room. I was just trying to wash my socks, I promise."  
  
Langly sat up straighter, blinking a few times, as his mouth failed to produce words.  
  
"I'd ask what you did, because that sounded very successful, but I don't ever want to experience the images that would put in my head." Frohike came back with cups.  
  
"Can you, I don't know, not mention any of this in front of him? I swear I'll buy foam panels and do the walls as soon as it gets here."  
  
"I was going to suggest a ball gag." Frohike turned a few containers until he found the one he was looking for.  
  
"Maybe try not saying that in front of him either."  
  
"Step too far, Frohike," Byers pointed out, with a sympathetic wince.  
  
Frohike looked at the two of them like he might say something rude, and then the rest of the thought caught up with him. "Shit. Sorry. I read that one."  
  
"I'd like to put to a vote asking him to join us. It's not like it's going to put him in more danger than he's been in since the first time he came through that door, already knowing who we were." Byers took a couple of egg rolls and handed the box to Langly. "It's not going to do us any harm, either. Might be nice to have someone on the outside, again."  
  
"At least he's smarter than Jimmy," Langly muttered around a mouthful of egg roll. "But, he's still a fed. I liked Mulder, but he wasn't one of us."  
  
"You already crossed that line and set it on fire behind you," Frohike pointed out. "I agree with the sentiment, but not out of you. You're boning him."  
  
"Which is exactly my point. I'm in a position where my judgement should be compromised, and I still don't think it's a good idea." Langly shook his head. "Not yet. You're jumping the gun, Byers."  
  
"Am I interrupting something?" Reid asked, from the kitchen doorway.  
  
"Nothing important," Frohike assured him, holding out a cup of tea in his direction.  
  
Byers leaned over and pulled a box off a chair on the other side of the table. "The Black Queen told us what happened, before you ended up here. I asked a few more questions and paid for overnight shipping."  
  
Reid looked confused, but took the tea and turned his attention to the box and the folding knife Frohike produced from somewhere. As he set the tea aside to open the box, he caught the utterly baffled look Langly shot Byers. The first thing in the box was a sweater vest, four days of clothes right under it, down to socks and underwear, all of it brands he wore, colours he liked. "How did you--?"  
  
"Agent Jareau called back to the evidence team in your house and asked them to check. I put in the order before you even got here." Byers shrugged, offering a small smile. "Coffee's probably at the bottom. I know what it's like to lose everything. We wanted to make sure you'd have something you recognised."  
  
"I'd have added some more food to that order, but we heard your kitchen was mostly empty," Frohike noted. "I didn't want to guess and be wrong."  
  
"I don't know what to-- Thank you." Reid held on to the edges of the box like he was clinging to the last shreds of disintegrating reality. "Whatever you laid out for this, I'll--"  
  
"No you won't," Langly cut in. "We can afford it."  
  
"Really, don't. I spent more on tea, last month." Frohike held up his hands.  
  
"You probably saved our lives," Byers pointed out. "It's the least we can do."  
  
"You've got that backward." Reid looked at Byers and pointed at Langly. "He saved my life."  
  
"Narcisse was looking for us -- all of us -- to get to him. Having seen her work, I have some concerns about whether she might have succeeded, and not by brute force," Frohike admitted. "She used the DoD hack to set up Vanity. I don't want to think about what she could have unleashed on us, if she'd found us."  
  
"Bait, apparently." Langly wiggled his fingers. "Not what I meant to do, at all, but it worked, I guess. If I meant it, I'd've had something better than bathroom clutter to fight with. And don't give me that I saved your life shit. She was shooting at _me_ , not you."  
  
"She was still going to shoot me, anyway," Reid argued. "I'm lucky she didn't shoot me before she went for you."  
  
"Yeah, well... I meant to hit her in the head. So much for that." Langly cleared his throat and nudged a box of Chinese food down the table. "You should eat something."  
  
"After that adventure, you should definitely eat something," Frohike teased, dodging a kick from Langly as he made his way around the table to sit next to where Byers was still hovering like a nervous holiday hostess.  
  
"I've eaten since then..." Reid blinked a few times, confused, as he slid the box of clothing down the table and took the seat over the corner of the table from Langly. He'd wash everything first and then wear something that felt more familiar than Langly's jeans.  
  
"More recent adventure," Byers filled in, eyes on his plate as he scooped rice onto it.  
  
"Did I not _just_ ask you not to bring that up?" Langly flicked hot mustard at Byers and Frohike.  
  
Reid turned an amazing shade of red, looking like he might be trying to figure out if bolting from the table was still an option, at this point.  
  
"It's not about you, it's about me," Langly assured him. "And this problem stops as soon as I can get some soundproofing foam in here."  
  
"I'm just glad you're having a good time," Byers volunteered.  
  
Reid shook his head, finally. He pointed up. "You were smart enough to put in a lower ceiling, but I'm pretty sure the problem _is_ the ceiling. It's not absorbent enough to keep the sound from going _up_ , and that's where it's echoing. It's smarter to insulate the ceiling, than to hit everything with foam and hope for the best."  
  
Frohike cleared his throat. "I'll leave it to the two of you to work out the physics, but the burning question nobody's been asking: For god's sake, it's Langly. Is he really that good, or--"  
  
"Yes." Reid looked Frohike right in the eyes, impenetrable poker face firmly in place. "You shouldn't ask things you don't want the answer to."  
  
Byers pointed at Frohike with his chopsticks. "You walked right into that."  
  
"It's been none of your business, all these years, because I didn't want to embarrass you." Langly looked inhumanly smug. "I am a sex god."  
  
Reid nodded sagely, swallowing his embarrassment. Fight fire with fire seemed to be the order of the day. "It's true. He is."  
  
"Still pretty sure there's no way this is what it looks like." Frohike shook his head. "You're not on first name terms, and I've never seen you touch, aside from that horrible folding chair accident."  
  
"Being on first name terms would require either of us to actually want to be addressed that way," Reid pointed out, carefully shaking the last of the rice out of one box and pouring orange chicken over it. "You can't fault me for calling him 'Langly'. You do it, too, and you've known him longer."  
  
"And we're not into public displays of affection. That's how you get knifed." Langly made a quick stabbing gesture with his chopsticks, before he went back to stuffing noodles in his mouth.  
  
"I'm a very private person," Reid demurred, nibbling at a bit of chicken, unwilling to commit to putting an entire bite in his mouth until this part of the conversation ended.  
  
"At the top of your lungs," Frohike retorted.  
  
Reid tipped his head toward Langly. "Sex god."  
  
Langly slurped a noodle loudly, the end of it finally flipping up and sticking to his glasses.  
  
"Yes, I can see that," Frohike drawled, as Langly made distressed noises and tried to wipe the sauce off the lens.  
  
"Wasn't I supposed to, you know, calm down and stop being an asshole?" Langly complained, dipping the corner of a napkin into his tea and trying again to get the last of the sauce smear off his glasses. "I'm pretty sure this isn't helping."  He put his glasses back on and glared down the table at Frohike. "And I know where you sleep."  
  
Byers held up his hands. "Stop. Both of you." He pointed at Frohike. "Especially you."  
  
"For once," Langly muttered.  
  
"The three of you have been living together since... nineteen eighty-nine? Ninety?" Reid asked, completely changing the subject.  
  
"How have we not murdered each other?" Langly flicked hot mustard at Frohike.  
  
"We're the only people we can trust." Frohike shrugged, tossing a napkin over the spot on the table where Langly had completely missed. "We have a mission and a purpose. Everything else is just cabin fever."  
  
"We almost got killed together, because Mister Federal Communications Dipshit decided he wanted to stick his dick in a gaping national security hole," Langly huffed, gesturing at Byers with the back end of his chopsticks without dropping any noodles. "It sounded easy, right, and then suddenly I'm up to my eyeballs in the DoD and there's three agencies breathing down our necks. With guns. And scary gas that makes you see aliens and rip all your clothes off, and I could've done without that eyeful. Ever."  
  
"It was like a trainwreck. Impossible to look away." Byers shook his head almost reverently. "I don't know who the second team was, but the first was FBI."  
  
"First team," Langly scoffed. "It was just Mulder."  
  
"Either way, they didn't want him walking out of there with Susanne. So, we're just standing there like part of the furniture and these two guys start shooting at him, and they blow a hole in this case of the stuff, and it goes everywhere." Frohike paused and looked at Byers. "I don't remember losing my marbles. Why didn't we get hit?"  
  
"Because like the intelligent members of the species we are, we ran away from the shooting and the cloud of -- did we even know what it was, yet?" Langly interrupted himself with another mouthful of noodles.  
  
Byers nodded and swallowed. "That's how she convinced us to go down there."  
  
"And then the third team showed up and started cleaning everything and packing up the bodies," Frohike went on.  
  
"Including the dead guy who wasn't dead." Langly shuddered at the thought and laid his chopsticks on the edge of his plate.  
  
"Do you remember why they decided not to take Mulder?" Byers asked.  
  
"Fuck Mulder," Langly snapped. "He was tripping balls so hard he invented new balls just to trip them. I don't care if that makes sense. You had to be there. But the more important thing is why the hell they left us alive after Mister Federal Communications Dipshit, over here, decided to federally communicate his displeasure with the situation. We could have just shut the hell up and been passed over as furniture, but no. You had to open your mouth, didn't you, Byers?"  
  
"It wasn't _right_!" Byers argued, moving the mustard out of Langly's reach before any more of it could go airborne.  
  
"The only way that could have gone more wrong is if I'd successfully pissed myself when you didn't die of Russian roulette." Langly folded his arms and leaned back.  
  
"I think it might've been worse if I'd actually gotten shot," Byers volunteered.  
  
"At the time? I didn't know you. I didn't care."  
  
"Projectile vomit fountain," Frohike pointed out. "You know what you're like, Langly."  
  
"Still better than pissing myself. The key word is 'projectile'. It wasn't going to end up _on me_."  
  
"Pretty sure you would've had Byers on you. In chunks."  
  
Langly's hands clenched into fists, where they were tucked under his arms, and he swallowed hard. Reid shot a pleading look at Byers.  
  
"Anyway, I asked him what happened to JFK, and I'll never forget what he said," Byers cut in.  
  
"I heard it was a lone gunman," Langly quoted, eyes shut tight.  
  
"And here we are. Still alive and well, through some combination of wits and skill." Frohike spread his hands and shrugged.  
  
"Mostly mine, thanks," Langly muttered. "Some credit to Byers for looking like a narc in public, when we needed to be all businessy in person."  
  
"So, the three of you just... moved in together? You didn't know each other before this?" Reid glanced around the table as if he were sitting with lunatics.  
  
"Oh, I knew that half-pint of snake oil and shitty wiring from way back." Langly gestured vaguely in Frohike's direction.  
  
"My shitty wiring? Yours was the box that burst into flames," Frohike argued.  
  
"Exactly _once_ , and I was nineteen. What's your excuse, old man?"  
  
"Unlike you, I didn't need an excuse. My hardware worked." Frohike waved a dismissive hand.  
  
"Point is, we suddenly got adopted by an FBI agent, and he was pretty bent on finding the truth, too, after his wild naked acid party. Not that I could blame him, really. I mean, what did we end up doing? But, no way was I going back home with that behind me. A fed who knew my name? No thanks." Langly finally opened his eyes and considered the rest of his lunch.  
  
"You mean you had thirty-eight dollars to your name and nowhere to go." Frohike raised an eyebrow.  
  
"Pssh. Minor details," Langly huffed. "If I wanted to go back, I'd have gotten there."  
  
"So, I took the ungrateful hippy home with me, like a kitten out of a sewer grate, complete with yowling, hissing, and batting at everything in reach. I'm just lucky he didn't pee in my laundry."  
  
Langly sat bolt upright, blinking, mouth opening and closing around the beginnings of any number of sentences that never left it.  
  
"When we first got our old place, I paid for the first few months," Byers said, quietly. "I was still working for the FCC, for a while, and then I just couldn't do it any more."  
  
"He means he had an actual income," Langly pointed out. "And then _we_ had an actual income, not that it was ever much."  
  
"And now we're unspeakably rich and still living in a warehouse," Byers pointed out.  
  
"My doing!" Langly pointed proudly at himself, with both hands. "Investments. It's all just numbers. If you play safe, with a large enough initial investment, you get a tiny percentage back, but it's a tiny percentage of a huge amount, and it's way more than enough to live on. And everything I deal with thinks we're about five corporations, anyway, so... It's not that hard. It's a lot less hard if you do things that are completely illegal that I'm not even going to think about in the same room with a fed, no matter how hot."  
  
"I appreciate that." Reid peered into a few of the boxes that littered the table. "Where did the egg rolls end up?"  
  
Frohike passed the box and a cup of mustard Langly's fingers hadn't been in. "Anyway, that's our story. You probably knew most of it already."  
  
"I didn't. Most of the X-Files weren't digitised. All I knew was the end of the story, not the beginning." Reid considered the mustard with a wary eye. "Besides, the beginning doesn't sound like it would've been one."  
  
"It was if you were Mulder." Langly finally attempted the rest of the noodles. "That was some wild trip. He was _sure_ there were aliens. I mean... there _were_ aliens, but that was later. And after that shit, I'm still not sure there were actually aliens, no matter what _anybody_ saw. Still. Worth another look. I'm not gonna say there _weren't_ aliens."  
  
"We've seen way too much shit for that," Frohike agreed.  
  
"Definitely never going to look at sharks the same way again." Byers cleared his throat and blinked pointedly.  
  
Langly put his elbow on the table and his forehead in his hand, staring straight down into his lap for a few long breaths. "Can we please not talk about sharks at the dinner table?"  
  
"You all right?" Reid asked, wiping egg roll grease off his fingers, just in case.  
  
"Body bag full of barf. Every time sharks come up, it's all I can think of."  
  
Byers nodded in agreement. "If anyone had asked us, we'd have told them not to bag you until you were done."  
  
"If anybody asked you, if anybody asked me -- nobody asked. We were supposed to be dead. You don't talk to corpses, Byers."  
  
"The cleanup team in the warehouse," Reid said, suddenly, finally making the connection. "You got picked up by the same kind of team, didn't you?"  
  
Frohike nodded. "I was pretty sure that was it, for us. The Lone Gunmen, made and unmade by the same hands. But, somebody wanted us alive. I still don't know who made that decision."  
  
"Then I'm probably not the only one or even the first to know where you are," Reid pointed out. "Follow the money -- and someone knows where the money started."  
  
Langly shook his head, still staring into his lap. "You can't follow the money. The money's been through places where we don't exist and the banks won't tell anyone anything. That and I went back in and removed the records behind us. There's no way to connect what we have to what they gave us. I was so careful, because of exactly that."  
  
Frohike watched Reid over the table. "And here we've been talking about ourselves this whole time. You're good at not being a subject of conversation, aren't you?"  
  
"I'm well-documented. There's not a lot I could say that you don't already know." A thin smile crossed Reid's face. "What am I going to tell you? Sometimes I have headaches and I don't like creamed spinach. I spend most of my time alone, and I like it that way, no offence meant."  
  
"We must be making you crazy," Byers apologised blotting up a spot of sauce on his plate with a bit of rice.  
  
"He's already crazy, but I'm sure you're not improving the situation," Langly retorted, finally raising his face and pushing his glasses up. He looked a bit green.  
  
"It's a fascinating study in family dynamics," Reid offered, between bites. "And that's the second time today you've called me crazy, Langly."  
  
"Because you're a fucking nutterbar." Langly picked up his tea, but didn't drink it. "I'm pretty sure I also said I thought it was a good thing."  
  
"I mean, you're sleeping with Langly," Frohike pointed out. "Not the act of a person in their right mind."  
  
Byers leaned back as he watched Langly put down the tea and grab a plastic spoon. Still, he didn't say anything until the first sauce-soaked square of pork bounced off Frohike's cheek. Frohike had at least that much coming, he was sure. "Please don't start a food fight. We have company!"  
  
_'Thank you,_ ' Reid mouthed at Byers, before he spoke, eyes lighting on Frohike. "If that's the local definition of crazy, I'll accept the label and wear it with pride." Predatory amusement curled the corner of his lips. "Still, you do seem to have an undue fascination with Langly's sex life. One might go so far as to postulate some envy, though the question remains which side you envy. Thirty years is a long time to harbour a crush, particularly while living with someone."  
  
Byers burst out laughing.  
  
"Then what about his obsession with Byers and Susanne?" Frohike shot back, and Langly looked up sharply, mouth opening for a sentence Reid got to first.  
  
"Langly's supposed virginity isn't going to get you killed. Susanne is at least as dangerous as I am, and from what I've heard, substantially more so." Reid tipped his head contemplatively. "I've only almost gotten one of you killed."  
  
"We've been over this," Langly grumbled into his tea."That was me, not you."  
  
"Besides, you've still got an entire decade to wreak havoc before we can really compare," Frohike admitted.  
  
"No." Langly glared across the cup, elbow still on the table. "She almost got us killed _the day we met her_. I got a whole six weeks before I almost got shot by someone who was actually looking to shoot me, _personally_ , this time. There is not, and there will never be, a comparison there."  
  
"Except for the part where you decided to, as _you_ put it, stick your dick in a gaping security hole."  
  
"Hey, at least neither of us went in for _Yves_ , speaking of almost getting us killed," Byers argued.  
  
"Almost getting us killed repeatedly, and robbing us blind," Langly added. "It's official. Your taste is terrible, Frohike. She almost ripped my lips off, and not in a fun way."  
  
"Yves? What makes you think--?" Frohike blinked, stunned. "I _thought_ about it. We _all_ thought about it. When would that have worked? When would I have had the time? And what makes you think I'd have actually gotten any closer to her than I absolutely had to?"  
  
Langly scoffed. "What, I'm supposed to believe you were saving yourself for Scully?"  
  
Byers blinked. "Oh."  
  
Langly's eyes drifted toward Byers, the rest of his face suddenly still. "Oh, shit."  
  
"If it's all three of us, does that still make it a fetish?" Byers asked.  
  
"If it was a fetish, I'd have been a lot more into you before you quit your stupid narc job," Langly shot back, horror still slowly spreading across his face.  
  
"More into." Frohike raised his eyebrows at Reid.  
  
Reid studied Byers for a moment. "He does have his charms."  
  
Langly kicked his chair back, holding both hands in front of him. "Whoa. Whoa! Not what I meant. That is not-- Do you have any idea how drunk I would have to be to even consider--?"  
  
"Yeti-photos drunk?" Frohike quipped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~No, this doesn't mean a return to regular updates. This just kind of happened. I'm still up to my eyeballs in actual work.~~


	9. Chapter 9

Langly looked up from where he was working and kicked the chair Reid sat in, working his way through a series of alternate history novels. "Listen, you're the best thing to ever happen to me, and I love that you're breathing my air, but you absolutely cannot be sitting next to some things I'm about to do. Go distract Byers for a few hours, would you? I don't need him walking up on this, either."  
  
"I probably wouldn't understand any of it anyway," Reid pointed out, extracting himself from the chair and trying to gather up the stack of books he'd finished.  
  
"Do you... actually remember anything reading that fast?" Langly blinked as he finally took in the size of the pile, and then realised that was probably a stupid question, given how fast he could take in a steady stream of incoming data.  
  
"I'm cheating, but yes. I can also recite all of it, complete with page numbers. Eidetic memory. I see it; I know it." Reid tucked the stack under his chin and raised his eyebrows. "Any suggestions for distracting Byers?"  
  
"I'd say you should get him to tell you the one about the space lasers, but then he's going to cry, and then I'm going to cry, and nobody wants that. Ask him about the midget's husband and the pro wrestler. That's got some crunch to it. That's also the one where he gets to be a total showoff about having built an MRI from spare parts. He knew what he was doing. All I had to do was solder that shit together, because never trust Byers with a soldering iron." Langly rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Of course if you ask Frohike, never trust me with a soldering iron either, but he's full of shit, and I have the steadiest hands in the house."  
  
"Noted." Reid's smile was a little too bright, but he set off with the books, hoping he wouldn't have to go looking for Byers. That would be awkward, at best.  
  
The quest ended just short of the shelves Reid meant to put the books on, in the back room, where he found Byers sprawled over the beanbag chair, staring straight up at a handful of creased pages.  
  
"Anything good?" Reid asked, trying to figure out how to set the books down without dropping any. Under other circumstances, he'd never have interrupted someone so intent on something, but if he was going to keep Byers away from Langly, he needed to become relevant before Byers decided to get up from that impossible seat.  
  
"I can't tell, yet." Byers leaned further back, until the beanbag shifted and he was looking at Reid upside down. "A correspondent sent in something they found on Reddit that reminded me of something else, and I'm really glad we digitised all our backissues before ... well... Anyway, not a source I would usually look twice at, but the similarities were immediately obvious, and I can't tell if this is someone building out from our story, or if it's happening again."  
  
"Here, let me see?" Reid leaned the stack of books against the side of a bookcase and slid the pile to the floor. "False reports are always difficult, especially when they involve events with a low report rate. The less available data that is known to be accurate, the harder it is to determine the accuracy of an unknown."  
  
"And what we have is only second-hand to begin with, so the finer points of the experience aren't something I can comment on. But, there are parts of this description I'd know anywhere." Byers sorted through the pages and offered three of them to Reid. "There are some things you never forget."  
  
"Hold onto those. Whether or not you want to remember, unforgettable things have value for just that reason. They keep you grounded." Reid folded himself down onto the floor next to the beanbag, having left the good chair with Langly, and took the pages from Byers.  
  
"I think I'd rather hold onto a handful of memories of fleeting happiness, if it's all the same." Byers tried to sit up and failed, becoming more upside-down in the process.  
  
"There comes a point where what you want is a lot less important than what you know is real." Reid went through the pages twice, with a slow blink between passes. "Speaking of knowing what's real..."  
  
"Yeah. That's kind of my point." Byers struggled to sit up, again. "I've seen it go both ways -- do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? But, given the choice, I'd rather be both. And you see it, here. It's not the regrets that make this stop working; it's the happy memories. It's the desire to go back to what was there, before."  
  
"That's what Hotch said, too -- memories of happy truths. I don't know, I've just found it much faster to look for something that should be wrong and isn't -- that's where the failures happen. Logical inconsistencies." Reid seemed to fold in on himself, but barely moved at all. "Or to remember that whatever it is, I've probably been through worse."  
  
"That probably works for you because you _have_ been through worse than what most people, even the ones who design and implement things like this, can muster. I keep looking back at the files, because I'm surprised you're alive." A disconcerted chuckle slipped out of Byers. "Of course, I'm starting to think that's just an FBI thing. You spend enough years with the Bureau and suddenly somebody's rewriting your DNA and you've been abducted by what may or may not have been aliens."  
  
"Ex _cuse_ me?" Reid set the papers aside. "I've seen some things. I've read all the X-Files I could find -- every case Mulder touched that was digitised. But, that still sounds like a bit of a stretch."  
  
"Oh, that doesn't even begin to stretch." Byers's next attempt to sit up failed so badly his neck bent against the floor when the beanbag settled. "I hate this chair. I always think I like this chair, but I hate this chair."  
  
"And here I thought being retired from your government job might protect you from it," Reid joked, and Byers looked at him blankly. "I also hate that chair. Langly and I decided it was a fed trap."  
  
Byers laughed, sinking further down onto his shoulders, as the beanbag shifted. "You know how we ended up with this, right? We were trying to get some basic furniture in, while we finished the interior, and when Frohike scrolled past this thing, we all stopped and looked at each other and agreed we'd always wanted one. Apparently there was a reason we never had one, and it was a good one. I don't know why I keep sitting in it."  
  
"Because it looks comfortable. Really, it is comfortable. It's just also impossible to get back out of... mostly." Reid studied the way Byers had nearly slid out of the chair. "You could probably do this, or I could help you. It's up to you."  
  
"I'll take the hand, since you're offering."  
  
Reid pried Byers out of the chair, suddenly clearly understanding how Langly had misjudged the distance, but where Langly had panicked, he just stepped back, avoiding the collision entirely. "So, what's going on in the new report?" he asked, nodding to the papers Byers still held.  
  
Byers handed Reid the rest of the pages and bent down to pick up the first set. "It's not the same facility, but the key points are almost identical. The differences look like this is a later facility built for the same purpose, probably by the same people. Like it's had some of the bugs worked out. You have to know, if it was up to me, we'd be out there. We'd just go get a look."  
  
"But, you can't, so we're stuck with armchair speculation and textual analysis." Reid looked through the pages in his hand. "Though, I will say there's a certain amount of perspective that comes with not being physically involved in an investigation, in not being close enough to become a potential target. And of course, on the one hand, oh good, I'm not standing in the remains of a horrifying series of events. On the other, what am I missing by relying on second-hand reports?"  
  
"And that's the eternal question. You can't judge the relevance of things you don't know are there." Byers sighed and made his way to the other side of the wide room, where a large red couch faced an enormous television with three smaller screens stacked to either side. "Come sit somewhere reasonable and tell me what you see."

* * *

There were some things Langly would never forget, regardless of the fact that he never used that information, and the identity he and Byers had built for Susanne was on that list. He checked on things he knew were there, first -- all the traps they'd laid were still in place, unaltered by the passage of time. No one had come looking. The initial dataset had never been seriously questioned.  
  
Further on, he found all the signs of a person coming to life -- credit pings for getting a card, buying a car... never a mortgage, interestingly. And he fell down that hole for a while, but she'd never owned property in her own name. As he followed the trail of driver's licenses across the country, he realised something else, as well: they weren't real. The addresses looked valid and would show up as places that should exist on a map, but they were all missing locations -- lot numbers swallowed by the building next door; the number that would be that lot, if the lot didn't face off the other street on that corner; the half-number suggesting an alley entrance but actually resolving to an electric substation. Someone was still looking after her, and _well_.  
  
And that was something he really didn't want to consider too long: what if she'd moved on? What if he found her and she didn't want anything to do with Byers any more? Only one thing to do, in that case, and that was just... not tell Byers. Anything. Ever.  
  
It was with that thought as his shield that he delved into marriage records. And somewhere in the middle, he stopped, staring at the screen in confusion.  
  
He reached out and hit a button under the monitor, guessing which room Frohike would be in. "Frohike? Come up here, a minute. I need you to look at something and tell me what you see, because ... this ... can't be real."  
  
Minutes later, Frohike appeared, bundled up in an enormous bathrobe. "You sure you should be up here? I think Byers is stealing your boyfriend."  
  
"Winding me up isn't going to work. I hope they're doing some freaky weird science that will keep them out of my way for a little longer, because Operation Do Something Useful just hit a very large bump." Langly rolled his chair to the side and tapped the screen. "What do you see?"  
  
"That's a marriage record, filed in Illinois, for a Holly Fitzgerald to--" Frohike blinked. "Oh, _shit_."  
  
"No shit, 'oh shit'," Langly huffed, folding his arms as he leaned back to look at Frohike. "She's a ghost, first of all. Very little actual paper. All the addresses are fake. Mail goes to general delivery most of the time, with a few post boxes along the way. And that is _definitely_ fake. And I think, though I can't prove it, that the record was inserted after we were dead."  
  
"She fake-married Byers." Frohike was still staring at the screen, stunned.  
  
"Go get your chair, because I need a second set of eyes, and it can't be either of _them_." Langly pointed toward the desk-fortress on the other side of the room. "For obvious reasons. I just need a witness to tell me I'm not losing my mind."  
  
"The world just became a very strange place, and I say that with full knowledge of what we've come to accept as 'normal'." Frohike backed away, eyes on the screen until he hit the railing. "Coffee?"  
  
The sound of a can opening followed him back down into the hall.  
  
"No, I'm good." Langly shook his head and pulled the keyboard over, as something else occurred to him. "I just need to know if she inherited, because if she did, it's possible she has all our shit, and I want it back. It's also possible she's a real ghost, and this is a setup. And I just walked right into it." He looked up at another screen. "But, there's nothing looking back at us."  
  
Uneasy, Langly changed the parameters of the search: 'Holly _Byers_ ', point of origin Aurora, Illinois.

* * *

Hours later, Langly passed through the back room, where Reid and Byers were wedged together on the couch, arguing over an enormous rough blueprint on the coffee table, pencils and highlighters in hand. He said nothing, barely gave them a glance, as he aimed for the back hall, looking somewhere between concussed and nauseated.  
  
"What'd Frohike do this time?" Byers asked, with a sigh, as he finally spotted motion off to one side, and looked up.  
  
"What?" Langly blinked, dazedly. "Frohike? No. No, I just ..." He laughed, weakly. "Haven't been sleeping. Yeah. Too much of a good time, and it all just caught up. I just need to go lie down for a bit."  
  
"Are you sure you're all right?" Reid asked, not because he expected a different answer, but just to remind Langly that he was there.  
  
"It's fine." Langly's smile was anything but believable as he waved a dismissive hand and vanished through the door.  
  
"He's full of shit. You know that, right?" Byers muttered to Reid.  
  
"Literally, I hope." Reid leaned back as far as he could manage, looking toward the door Langly had disappeared through. "Do you mind if I--"  
  
Byers shook his head. "Go. I hope you're right. I hope it's just food poisoning."  
  
Reid had a sense it was whatever Langly hadn't wanted him to see, and he hoped that whatever it was wouldn't turn out to have been the kind of dangerous they'd have to do something about.


	10. Chapter 10

Coming up on the door to Langly's ... more than a room, really. Reid thought it might be larger than his entire apartment. But, coming down the hall, he suddenly understood the complaints about the noise from Byers and Frohike. Langly sounded like he might be on the phone -- one side of a conversation.  
  
"Look, I said I was sorry, Cherise. It's been a little crazy this week, with the wildfires. My boyfriend got evacuated, so it's been nothing but mayhem, and I spent Thursday night in a police station straightening everything out and picking him up. It's nothing personal -- I just -- this is the first chance I've had to--" Langly turned around, hand on one side of his headset, and spotted Reid leaning in the doorway. "Panda, you tell her. The boyfriend Cherise doesn't think I have is standing in the doorway looking confused."  
  
He tapped the mic button and pulled the headphones down around his neck. "I ditched my team on Friday. We were supposed to compete, but... They got on fine without me. I think they got on better without me, but Cherise is having a meltdown because I didn't tell her ahead of time that I wasn't going to be there."  
  
"Competition Dance Dance Revolution," Reid remembered, looking exactly no less confused. "Wildfires?"  
  
"It's an easy excuse. They don't actually know where I am, so I can say shit like that instead of saying 'Oh, yeah, I got shot at by a madwoman and the fed I'm boning had to move in for a week because his house is a crime scene.' Which, I mean, it's a great story, but it's not the kind of story you drop on the seventeen-to-twenty fives who are just using you for your great legs and ability to process incoming data at ridiculous speeds."  
  
"Boyfriend, huh?" One side of Reid's mouth curled and his eyebrows drifted up.  
  
"Again, as far as anyone knows, I'm a twenty-two year old woman with very good taste in men. All hail good processing software." Langly gestured at the laptop, where tiny icons lit up to indicate who was speaking on one side of the screen, and the other side held what looked to Reid like some sort of audio software. Langly pulled up one earpiece and punched the mic button. "Hey, I heard that!" He rolled his eyes at Reid. "Would you come say hello to Cherise so she stops insisting I'm making shit up?"  
  
"Does someone else think you're a virgin? Is this a common problem?" Reid teased, trying not to look as uncomfortable as he was with the idea. "What have you told them about me?"  
  
Langly turned off the mic. "You're a hot cop, I'm a network administrator. We met over a contract I can't discuss because it's an open case. Supposedly we have wildfires, and you've been evacuated, and I live further away from the source. Are you cool with this?"  
  
"It's one of the weirdest things I've ever been asked to do, outside of work." Reid held out a hand for the headset. "I'll make you a deal. I'll talk to your team, if you tell me what the hell happened out there."  
  
Langly turned off the voice effects. "Done. I'll tell you everything that wouldn't make things difficult between us."  
  
Reid understood that to mean Langly would gloss over the parts that were illegal. "Thanks. What do they call you? What do they call me?"  
  
"You can call yourself whatever you want. I'm ..." Langly cleared his throat and nudged his glasses up over a long blink. "... Spastic Fantastic."  
  
Reid choked on a laugh as he put on the headset. "Is this thing on?"  
  
"Button on the left side. Push it in to turn it on, pop it out to turn it off."  
  
Reid listened to the voices of five women for a few seconds, before he hit the button. "Ah, hello?"  
  
The voices all stopped. A faint Québécois accent picked up first, and a glance at the icons on the laptop showed that was Cherise. "You are supposed to be Spastic's boyfriend?"  
  
"I told you she wasn't making it up!" 'Panda' sounded like Southern California.  
  
"I'm... Spastic's..." Reid laughed nervously, voice rising in pitch. "That's certainly one word for it."  
  
"Oh my god, listen to him! He's so squeaky! What are you, sweetie, sixteen?" Panda again.  
  
"Well into my thirties, thanks. I gather that I'm supposed to excuse Spastic's absence from your, ah... competition on Friday?" Reid cleared his throat. "At that point, neither of us had slept in longer than I'd like to admit to, and not for the fun reasons. I got removed from my home on Thursday night under... difficult circumstances, with nothing but a bedsheet to my name, so things have been a little, ah, hectic."  
  
All of the icons lit up in a sudden rush of indistinct noise that had the feel of a pack of predators taking an interest in freshly-bloodied prey. Langly shot Reid a concerned look, finding him standing perfectly still, eyes closed, trying to filter out complete sentences or at least phrases.  
  
"Yes, a bedsheet. Yes, I'm serious. It was not my finest moment." And that, Reid realised, a moment later, might not have been the best choice of words as the 'fine' jokes poured in. "I spent the night at work, where I did not have a change of clothes, because I was on vacation when it happened. Yes, Spastic had to rescue me and, er, replace my wardrobe. Wha-- Very grateful, yes."  
  
Langly grinned as Reid adapted, coming to the same conclusion -- Reid was sacrificing himself as a virtual sex object, to redirect the attention in the room. And that was very definitely a negotiating skill Langly hadn't expected.  
  
"What do I look like? Don't you think you should be asking Spastic? I'm not the one looking at me," Reid demurred, with another nervous laugh. "Spastic? Beautiful. Blond, very nice cheekbones, long legs... Like a dancer, or some Renaissance paintings of the Archangel Gabriel. Don't you know all this?"  
  
Langly had one hand stretched across his very nice cheekbones, embarrassment obvious, as he held the other one out for the headset.  
  
"And Spastic would like me to hand back the mic, now, so... good evening, ladies. May your next competition go more smoothly." Reid pushed the button to turn off the mic and pulled off the headset, dropping it over Langly's hand. "They'd be terrifying if I hadn't been out drinking with JJ and Garcia."  
  
"Ravening wolves, but they win at about the same rate I do. They're fun, when Cherise isn't pissed off." Langly's lips tugged up on one side as he pulled the headset back on and fiddled with something on the laptop. "And they all want to bang that guy from the show with the demons. I'm going to tell them that's what you look like." He punched the mic button. "Okay, I'm back. Now do you believe-- Oh my god, Obs, of course he's hot. What kind of stupid question is that? What would I be doing with an ugly cop?"  
  
Reid sat on the edge of the bed and watched Langly perform the part of a young woman in love. If he closed his eyes and just listened to the cadence of the words, it reminded him of JJ, in a lot of ways -- the way she talked about Will. But, with his eyes open, the strain was more obvious -- the way Langly's lips tightened against the things that crossed his mind, before he put them into the words that belonged here, instead of the ones he wanted to use; the way his entire body went still, like it did while he was working; the tiny, artificial motions that cued particular tones and turns of phrase.  
  
"Yes, okay, I'm sorry. I'd have said something sooner, but I really couldn't. I promise I'll be back in before the Hong Kong mini, but I can't promise you anything before that. Things are a little crazy." Langly paused, obviously trying to separate the threads of conversation. "Yeah, I really hope nothing else burns down; I've had about enough of that for a lifetime. Wish me luck! I have to go take care of some things for work."  
  
Another moment, and Langly turned off the mic, killed the bluetooth driver on the laptop, and took a three step leap that dropped him face-first into the middle of the bed hard enough for the springs to squeak on impact. "They're great. I swear."  
  
"That's not easy, is it?" Reid sounded like he already expected the answer.  
  
"They're all younger than me and better at the game, and Cherise knows I'm the weak point, but I'm usually available when Obscura isn't, so she doesn't really want to move to replace me. And Panda thinks I'm amazing, which is exhausting." Langly tossed the headset off the edge of the bed. "No, it's not easy, but when have I ever been into easy?"  
  
"You're good at it, though. If I could only hear you? I'd believe it."  
  
"Spastic's believable because she's basically real, aside from the part where she only exists on as much paper as I need to get into competitions. She's a cheap ghost, and all I have to do is stay within bounds." Langly groaned and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on his hand and adjusting his glasses, which miraculously hadn't fallen off. "Speaking of ghosts, you wanted to know what happened..."  
  
"I do." Reid nodded, hand twitching like he might reach out to touch Langly, but not finishing the motion.  
  
"Here's what you have to know: don't ask me anything you're not sure you want to know, because I will probably tell you. Just take it on faith that I have access to a lot more information than your average guy on the street -- than your average fed, if we're really going to be honest." Langly looked up at Reid, the weight of discovery clear even beyond the strain the call had put on him.  
  
Reid nodded again, blinking as he took in the implications. "Yeah, okay. I'm not asking about how you know, just what you know. Pretty sure how would just go right over my head, anyway."  
  
"I'm pretty sure you're even smarter than you give yourself credit for, and I'd rather not find that out the hard way." Langly looked grim.  
  
"Smart doesn't matter. I don't know because I don't want to know. Some people say it's stubbornness. I prefer to say I have a carefully curated experience of the world, in which I only have the most basic and necessary knowledge of things I don't care about, so I can spend more time on things I do."  
  
"I'll drink to that." Langly took a deep breath, blinked once, and then the words started pouring out. He trusted Reid to be able to keep up. "So, Susanne Modeski died in Las Vegas. I know that, because we helped her do that. She doesn't exist any more. We turned her into someone else, and I did a very good job, thank you. It was all kind of an in-joke with Byers, the names and dates, so pretty easy to remember. And that identity's still out there, supposedly living in Virginia."  
  
"Supposedly." Reid caught it.  
  
"Yeah, see, this is where things get weird. There's two of her, now. Well, three, if you count the original, but I don't, because that one's terminated. There shouldn't be any records after Vegas. I won't even look for 'Susanne Modeski', because I don't want to die." Langly closed his eyes to put the parts in the right order. "So, Holly Fitzgerald -- that's the name we gave her -- spent a few years bouncing around the midwest. Almost immediately before we disappeared -- according to the document dates, anyway -- there's a marriage license in Illinois with her name on it. She supposedly married Byers. I know for a goddamn fact she didn't marry Byers. That's the kind of thing he'd have been over the moon about. _We'd know_. Also, for it to have happened in Illinois, that would have meant us misplacing Byers for several days, and that didn't happen."  
  
"Well, I guess that answers the question of whether she's still interested." Reid was still struggling to make the rest of the connection.  
  
"Right, so, in Illinois, she forks. Holly Fitzgerald becomes Holly Fitzgerald-Byers. Sort of. Except Holly Fitzgerald continues on -- same name, same identity, supposedly living in Virginia. And a Holly Byers -- all new data -- originates in Illinois -- it's her. I've seen her driver's license photo, and I can see she's had a little surgery to throw off the facial recognition, but it's not quite enough to throw off an actual person holding all the data from her previous incarnations. Frohike agrees with me. It's her. And Holly _Byers_ is supposedly living in Florida. Is probably _actually_ living in Florida, given that her address is real, and Holly Fitzgerald's isn't. Except I'm not sure I'm willing to bet on that. It's a sloppy transition. One of these is her and one of these is a ghost, and the ghost is probably a trap."  
  
Reid blinked, blinked again, opened his mouth and closed it.  
  
"Yeah, you see my problem."  
  
"Originates in Illinois? Is there no further documentation behind her?"  
  
"Originates in Illinois like born in Aurora and never left until oh-four. The documentation's weak. I could do better without getting out of bed or putting on my glasses. I almost wonder if she didn't try to do it herself, it's so bad." Langly shook his head. "But, _she's_ not married. Holly Fitzgerald is married. And I have one or more real bad feelings about that, most of them involving whatever the hell happened to all our shit. It's not like my family was going to try to claim it. I'm not sure Frohike even has living relatives. I know Byers's dad is ... certain values of dead. Someone posing as Byers's wife could make a hell of a claim there."  
  
"Why would she want to?" Reid asked, perfectly sensibly. "What did you have that she'd want?"  
  
"She's why we had a newspaper. 'Find the truth and tell it to as many people as possible', she told us, and you know, it sounded like a good idea -- we were young and reckless and pissed off -- so that's exactly what we did. And then we ... 'died', and everything we'd been working on just disappeared, except the like fifteen hundred text files Byers had on that thumb drive."  
  
"Byers mentioned you'd gone digital with backissues."  
  
"We did, but what made it into print was only what we could prove. We had a decade of shit we could never quite confirm or that we could confirm but we were waiting until we were sure it wasn't going to get us nuked into oblivion if we went public." Langly huffed, still annoyed, even after all this time. "That was the thing -- we put out a lot of stuff that could have ended in our fantastically horrible deaths, but we did it in such a way that parts of the stories went to mass media, so we looked like we were just connecting the dots. If we were the only ones carrying any part of a story, it had to be something that wasn't going to end in us getting shot and the office set on fire. It meant we had to hold some things back until we could force parts of them into the public eye by other means and then get the rest out, after. It's a lot harder to go after some basement nobodies over something a CBS news chopper picked up video from."  
  
"So, if Holly did make a claim on your property, after your deaths, she'd have done it to get her hands on what you'd been working on -- to pick up where you left off, most likely." Reid's eyes lit up suddenly. "Wait, go back. Holly Byers originates in Illinois, _when_? And what are the dates? Are we sure she's a duplicate? A sudden faked marriage, a second identity in a very similar name..."  
  
"Wha-- OH." Langly blinked and shook his head, nearly knocking his glasses off against the edge of his hand. "No, the dates are wrong, but they're not _that_ wrong."  
  
"Next question: are you sure she's responsible for the marriage?"  
  
"I'm not sure of anything at this point, but there are a limited number of people who would be messing with her records in particular. And that's a weird one. If someone on the other side found her, why that? Why not just a warrant for her arrest or a shoot on sight?" Langly groaned and dropped onto his back, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. "None of this makes any sense, I don't know what I just stepped in, and _and_ I have a splitting headache."  
  
"I meant Byers," Reid said, quietly.  
  
"I'd know if it were Byers. It's not Byers." Langly pulled his glasses off and closed his eyes. "And more than that, it's especially not Byers _then_. The date the record was inserted has to be the same or later than the date on the record, because otherwise it would break something. You can't just post-date a marriage license or a birth certificate. You can sure as hell pre-date them, though. The problem is there's no reason for him to do it that late. If he was going to do it, he'd have done it years before that, when we built the original package. She'd have gone for it."  
  
"And these are things she couldn't have done, herself, the last time you saw her, so there's almost certainly a third party involved. The question is who they're working for. And you can't ask for help, because bringing attention to her is going to be dangerous for her, but also for you."  
  
"In short? Yes." Langly pressed the heel of his palm against the edge of his eye socket.  
  
"Do you want me to go get you something for your head?"  
  
"Took a pill before I staggered back here. I was hoping talking to the girls would loosen something up in my brain. No such luck." Langly groaned miserably. "Grab me the gel pillow from the freezer and tell Byers I'm stealing his cream soda. I'll be fine in an hour. Of course, any efforts you'd like to make to improve my condition, in the mean time, would be entirely welcome as long as none of them come into contact with anything above my shoulders."  
  
"I'll just have to lavish my affections upon your kneecaps," Reid joked, getting up.  
  
"When thinking doesn't make my eyeballs try to liquefy, we're going to have a long talk about your affections. And where the hell you left your glasses," Langly muttered. "The longer I spend with you, the more I think you need them."  
  
"Is this because I told your chorus of ravening maenads that you were gorgeous?" Reid paused at the door. "Because that's true, _and_ you had it coming. You told them I was your boyfriend."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And you thought I forgot about that one-line reference to competition DDR.


	11. The Third Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reid, agonising, because why sleep when you can have an existential crisis, instead.

Reid woke up with Langly tucked under his chin, both of them facing away from the dim light beside the bed. He wondered how he'd gotten used to another body in his space so quickly, taking in the way Langly clutched at his arm, the way he'd tossed a leg over Langly's hip, in the night, his ankle tucked back between Langly's thighs. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, there was raving panic, but at arm's length, as if he were watching it happen to someone else.   
  
Dissociating before breakfast; always a good start to the day.   
  
He walked himself slowly through the list of reasons he fully intended to disregard the weirdly distant urge to get up, take a very hot shower, and put himself in another room -- just like he'd done yesterday. No, today would be different. Today, this would be less weird, because he said so, which was a flimsy reason that wouldn't go far, most days, but waking up already outside himself was great for perspective.  
  
It was only the slightest motion to pull Langly closer against his chest, and Reid let himself focus on the way his own breathing fell into time with Langly's, the small, still-asleep sound of contentment as Langly's death-grip on his arm tightened a bit more. Simple, quiet, comfortable. All he needed was a good book and another hand to turn the pages.  
  
Without that, Reid's mind turned inward, going over recent events, over his own reactions, his own concerns. Langly was enjoyable, and in so many ways so fundamentally similar to himself, but the differences were stark. Particularly the fact that Langly's entire existence, at this point, was composed of carefully constructed lies and violations of international law.   
  
On the other hand, was it so different to witness protection? The primary difference seemed to be that there was no handler making it work -- Langly took credit for handling most of the back end, himself. But, someone had not just _let_ that happen, but _made_ that happen. Someone had made the Lone Gunmen -- which Reid still thought was a ridiculous name -- disappear. And with the layers of bureaucratic bullshit Reid had witnessed in his years with the FBI, that wasn't so hard to imagine. Certainly the story the three of them told aligned with the fairly circumstantial evidence Narcisse had provided, which meant that whatever had happened it was well beyond his pay grade, and he'd probably never find enough of the pieces to satisfy his curiosity.   
  
Still, explicable as it was, he wasn't quite sure he was comfortable with it, and he couldn't tell whether that was an objection to the methods or a gut reaction born of comparisons to other things that had gone horribly and irrevocably wrong.  
  
And speaking of wrong, he could admit this wasn't the relationship he wanted. If he closed his eyes and dreamed up some perfect love of his life and an eternity to spend with that person, it looked nothing like this. At all. At the very least, he'd expected someone _shorter_ , his mind insisted as it drifted in that space between waking and sleeping. An academic, probably. A largely self-educated conspiracy theorist hadn't even made the list of options he'd considered at any point, until now. Someone so thoroughly post-modern as to be working on transcending the boundaries of distance and physical perception? Honestly, not something Reid was entirely comfortable with, but the light it put in Langly's eyes was enough to make him slow down and consider the implications for the world, the implications for people who couldn't just reach out and touch things... other people... and he wondered, then, how things might have been different, if only this had been part of his world sooner.  
  
No, this wasn't what he thought he wanted, but he could appreciate it. He could enjoy it. He could learn from it. And maybe it would be good enough. Maybe it would be better than he'd ever imagined. This was so far outside anything he'd have considered probable, realistic, _possible_. But, that didn't have to mean it was a bad idea.  
  
It had been years since he'd felt the kind of desire that tugged at him when Langly touched him. Years since he'd been stunned stupid with lust. It was exactly the sort of thing he'd thought would be a one-time event, never to cross his path again, as he got older and took better control of his life and his whims. But he wanted and he'd been wanted, and he let it happen again. And here he was, lying in bed, with the owner of that bed half-naked and curled up in his arms. And just maybe, he admitted, with a pang of guilt, there wasn't anywhere else he wanted to be.  
  
Langly groaned and stretched, toes pointing before his eyes even opened, and the first thing he registered was that Reid was still in bed, still wound around him like a tangled blanket. "You up?" he murmured, almost inaudibly, still trying to figure out where he'd left his tongue.  
  
"I thought about getting up, but I didn't want to wake you. How's your head?"  
  
"Nothing that can't be fixed with Jolt and cold leftovers."  
  
"It's not gone, is it?" Reid recognised the combination -- cold and caffeine.  
  
"Hell no, but it will be if I hit it hard enough." Langly reached back and squeezed Reid's hip. "You're cute, but please stop sweating on me. It's not helping."  
  
"Sorry." Reid untangled himself from Langly. "I'm pretty sure I fell asleep somewhere near your feet. I don't know what happened."  
  
"I do." Langly laughed and coughed. "You would've been right where I kick the blankets off. You probably moved because I was pulling on you."  
  
"Mistaken for a blanket. I'm not sure how I feel about that."  
  
"It's because you're warm and comfortable and I like having you wrapped around me?" Langly offered, with some mild effort to look repentant.  
  
A surprised laugh fell out of Reid's mouth and his hand jumped up as if to catch it. He changed the subject, suddenly, not wanting to have the conversation that lay heavy across his tongue. "Do you want the shower, or can I--?"  
  
"You could. Or you could wait a couple of hours." A wicked smile spread slowly across Langly's face as he waited for the words to sink in.  
  
"Or I could just take another shower, later," Reid pointed out.  
  
"I feel like I should install an autoclave."  
  
"I am not _that bad_!"  
  
"You... kind of are." Langly nodded and regretted it.  
  
"This from the guy who showers once a week."  
  
"Twice in the summer! Way more often if I have to hike through sewers! And often enough that I have concerns about my hair, if there's a hot fed in that shower!" Langly sat up and ransacked the nightstand drawer for a hair tie, pulling his sweat-damp hair up off his neck. "No, really, you wash too much and your hair just gets awful. Well, maybe not _you_ , but the rest of the world has this problem."  
  
"And here's the most disgusting thing you will ever hear me admit to," Reid said, standing up and making sure there was nothing to trip on between himself and the bathroom. "I like the way you smell, in the morning." He paused. "And now I'm going to go wash and put on something I actually look like myself in."

* * *

By the time Reid got out of the shower, Langly had vanished into the other half of the building. He helped himself to a cup from the pot of coffee someone had put on at some point, and made his way forward until he found Langly perched before that panorama of screens, three crushed cans already next to him on the desk and one whole in his hand. As Reid came up, he spotted the cardboard container with chopsticks sticking out of it by Langly's other elbow.  
  
"This is fucking stupid," Langly declared, hearing the footsteps behind him. He turned around to finish the thought, already talking before the chair swivelled. "Look at this for me, Froh-- _Christ_!" He caught his breath and looked up the extra ten inches. "I feel like I should just be glad you're not Byers, right now."  
  
"Still working on that?" Reid asked, turning his eyes away from the screen. "Should I go?"  
  
"Go?" Langly blinked like he was trying to figure out where the idea had even come from. "Hell no, you should sit in my lap. I bet I can still type around you. And if I can't, well... I guess I'll just have to find something else to do with my hands."  
  
"This is probably the most public space in the entire--"  
  
"It's not. It's not the most private space, but it's definitely not the most public." Langly rocked the chair back temptingly. "And if Frohike's dumb enough to turn the cameras on, I can promise you he's smart enough to turn them back off."  
  
Reid continued to hang back, hoping to hide his discomfort with a few swallows of coffee. "Are you sure you're feeling better already?"  
  
Langly gestured to the cans on the desk. "The situation is improving rapidly." He blinked up at Reid, recognising the hesitation. "Too much?"  
  
"I can't tell," Reid decided, after a moment. "How strong is your desk?"  
  
"Can you sit on it? Yes. It won't even creak." Langly moved his breakfast out of the way, so Reid could sit in front of screens that weren't on.  
  
"Thanks. Also, if I have my back to it, I can't see what you're doing, but I can see Byers coming up behind you." A tiny smile crossed Reid's face, and he hid it behind his coffee.  
  
"Add that to the list of things I like about you."  
  
"What that I'm more sensible without a migraine than you are with one? I hardly think that counts."  
  
"How many people in the world are more sensible than you or me, at any point?" Langly scraped more cold noodles out of the box, into his mouth. "Trust me. It counts."  
  
"What time is it?" Reid finally thought to ask, having completely lost track of time and date in this windowless space that seemed to exist largely outside the bounds of the world outside.  
  
"Four in the morning. You get used to it, eventually." Langly nodded at a closed laptop with a red light mounted next to it, on the other arm of the desk. "If you want to leave a message for Her Majesty, she's usually in by a little after eight. Haven't heard anything since Friday night, but she said she'd let us know as soon as they're done fucking up your apartment."  
  
"Great. Thanks." The words sounded about as sincere as a bad punchline, and Reid tipped his head back and sighed. "Sorry. I _live there_. It's a little ... I'm going to be cleaning for days. Changing the locks. How am I supposed to sleep there? I know, it's stupid. It's a one-off. There's no reason to believe anything like that is ever going to happen again, except for the part where it kind of comes with the job, and it's been blatant good fortune that it's not usually me."  
  
"You could move," Langly suggested, washing down another bite of noodles with the open can of Jolt.  
  
"I thought of that." Reid shook his head, dismissively. "And then it just... the whole idea just curdled. Moving isn't going to solve anything, it's just going to put me somewhere I can't navigate blind. It doesn't matter _where_ I am; I'm just as easy to find, because my name's going to be on the lease. So, no. I can't really move. I can just put everything back where it goes and ... put all this back in the box it goes in and wait for the nightmares to stop."  
  
"You know you don't have to do this by yourself, right? I'm at least going to want to sweep the place for bugs again. Nothing against your people, but there's been a lot more people than yours in there. You might as well put me to work. I am totally capable of not screwing up laundry, and I'm awesome at ordering takeout."  
  
"Some part of me wants to insist I do have to do this myself -- I've always done everything myself." Reid looked contemplatively into his coffee. "And then I remember that you were _there_. This didn't just happen to me. This wasn't even about me." He looked up, catching Langly's eyes with his own. "So, yeah. I think I'm going to take you up on that."  
  
"And that's a few more days where I don't have to give up waking up next to your naked body," Langly teased.  
  
"I do not sleep naked. You should know that. This is entirely your influence and the fact that I don't have my pyjamas."  
  
"That's me. I'm a bad influence. Byers'll tell you it's true." Langly's smile was unrepentant.  
  
"Better not be too much of an influence, or you'll hear about it from Rossi." Reid watched Langly out of the corner of his eye.  
  
Langly blinked, horror drifting across his face at the thought. "I am a sweet and innocent virgin. Just ask Frohike."  
  
"I don't think Frohike would confirm any of those, at this point. Besides, I think you lost 'innocent' somewhere around Baltimore, didn't you?"  
  
"Baltimore," Langly scoffed. "I lost 'innocent' way before I ever set foot in Baltimore. And if I'm going to be honest, I don't know if 'sweet' was ever one of my features. Not even my mother said it. You know how everybody's mother always says they're such a sweet boy? Not me. I was just a pain in the ass."  
  
"Definitely a pain in my ass." Reid cleared his throat, and Langly looked up, offended. "Still a little sore."  
  
Langly laughed. "That is entirely _your_ fault. You knew what you wanted."  
  
"I'd still do it again." Reid chuckled.


	12. Chapter 12

"And weird dreams, too!" Reid laughed and nudged Langly's chair with his foot. "I mean, I have vivid, narrative dreams anyway, but you make them weird."  
  
"Nightmare weird or like Syd Barrett weird?"  
  
"David Bowie weird," Reid decided after a moment's thought. "Labyrinth weird."  
  
"Ah, the David Bowie is smuggling plums movie, where everyone who was late to the party suddenly realised they were bisexual." Langly grinned, eyes never leaving the screen, as he dug down into mostly-irrelevant financial records, waiting for something to pop.  
  
"Took me longer than that," Reid scoffed, realising how long it had taken him to perceive himself in any sexual context. "But, more the themes of liminality and performance as control under constant observation."  
  
"Ziggy Stardust." Langly nodded, having picked up the other end of that thread.  
  
"Exactly my point."  
  
"Still, you're dreaming about dreaming, at that point."  
  
"Not quite. Remember the masquerade scene? More like that." Reid cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably. The desk was not made for sitting on.  
  
"Getting swept off your feet by the Goblin King? There are worse things..."  
  
Reid cleared his throat again and stared intently into his empty coffee cup. "More naked."  
  
Langly's shoulders slowly squared and he blinked straight ahead, no longer seeing anything on the screen. In an instant, he'd pulled a small black box out of a desk drawer and pointed it at a few very specific angles, obviously waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, he set it aside and turned his chair to face Reid. "Tell me everything."  
  
Reid looked up, still not looking at Langly, and the first word out of his mouth, as his eyes widened was, "Byers."  
  
"Byers naked? You do have weird--"  
  
"No, Byers behind you!" Reid hissed.  
  
"Shit!" Langly started closing windows and backing out of the most obvious things, as Byers made his way up from the kitchen, two cups of coffee in hand.  
  
Byers ignored Langly's flustered tidying, as he offered one cup to Reid. "Dr Reid. I hope you slept well."  
  
Reid set aside his empty cup and accepted the one Byers held out. "Thanks," he said first, for the coffee, and then gestured at himself. "And thank you, again. I'm really feeling a bit more myself, today."  
  
"As opposed to every other day, where he's been feeling my bits," Langly joked, earning himself a firm kick in the chair that sent him sliding down the length of the desk.  
  
"I doubt you came up here to bring me coffee," Reid observed.  
  
"Actually, I came up here to get Langly to look at something for me. I don't know how close to this you want to be..." Byers shrugged apologetically.  
  
"That's why I'm sitting up here. I can't see anything from here." Reid offered a bland smile, a hint of mischief in the corners of his eyes.  
  
Langly pulled himself back in front of the keyboard. "What do you want from me?"  
  
"We have a correspondent I'm not sure about, all of a sudden. They've been sending in stuff that looks like continuations of things we've handled before, but it's a really interesting subset of them, and either we're looking at a whistleblower, or we have a problem." Byers put his own coffee to the far side of Langly's line of cans. "Pull up the news box and search for 'Alcea'. I'm going to grab my chair."  
  
"Hollyhock," Reid muttered, once Byers was completely across the room. "Probably irrelevant, but in light of other things..."  
  
"I'm betting on Virginia. Are you in?"  
  
"One, you haven't defined the terms of the wager. Two, you're probably right." Reid hid the words behind the fresh cup of coffee.  
  
"Loser tops."  
  
"I'd win either way, then. You're on."  
  
"I'd ask, but I suspect I'd regret knowing." Byers settled into his chair on Langly's other side, where he'd put his coffee.  
  
"Smart man." Langly looked up from the messages he'd been skimming. "These are all ... no, they're not all government facilities. A lot of them are private contractors, but these are all research into brain function -- memory and delusion. _Human_ tests."  
  
Reid's eyes widened and he grabbed Langly's arm. "Names. I want names."  
  
"Wha--" Langly looked up, confused, and then it struck him. "Oh, _shit_."  
  
Byers caught on, next. "Your mother."  
  
"Names, Langly. To the printer. I'm taking that list with me," Reid insisted.  
  
"I didn't see her current place anywhere in there," Byers assured him, as Langly started collating data. "You picked a good one. But, I can definitely see wanting to have a list on hand, for future reference."  
  
"I have names of individuals, too, but the chances they'd be using the same names in the private sector are pretty slim. Still, people are stupid. You use something you'll remember. Something similar enough to cover any mistakes." Langly never stopped typing. "Let me finish this, and I'll run a loose comparison against the staff list, just to make sure. I know you'll want to do it by hand, and I'll give you the lists, but let me do it my way. After Yves, I'm surprisingly good at this."  
  
"After Yves, that's less surprising," Byers pointed out.  
  
Langly hit one last key with a small flourish, and the printer on the other side of the room warmed up. "Okay, that's happening. Did we run any of these?"  
  
"Not yet." Byers shook his head and pointed to the second to last message. "Dr Reid and I were reviewing that one, yesterday. The problem is that we can't check them. It's not like we can just drive down there and have a look. If we go live without checking..."  
  
"Yeah, I know. At what point do we become liable for someone else's mistakes -- or worse. At what point do we become the fault, do we become a reliable distribution point for misinformation?" Langly examined the message in question. "It's good. It's solid. It's got names, dates, places... I can verify at least some of this, but we really should get someone to go there and bring back ... something. Anything."  
  
"Right? That's what you'd think. That's what I think, too." Byers nodded and sipped his coffee. "So, there's the problem. It's someone feeding us a consistent stream of information, about one every three weeks, on very similar subjects that we have historically had an _interest_ in, regardless of the fact we've only published on the subject a couple of times. We have more articles about _Elvis_."  
  
"Yeah, but everybody's into Elvis." Langly shrugged. "You need copy, you can't go wrong with Elvis."  
  
"This is someone who knows us, Langly. This is someone looking for us." Byers stood up to pace. "I know that's irrational, but I can't shake it. There's something in there that doesn't feel right. I don't even know that the information's bad! It might not be! But, something isn't right. Someone's trying to draw us out by giving us things we can only verify by showing up. There's no photos, no video, no primary documents -- nothing but documentary text. I don't like it."  
  
"To be fair, most of what we get is just documentary text, and most of it is bullshit," Langly pointed out. "Do you want me to go after primary documents, and see what bites back? It's going to take a while to even figure out where to look -- none of this information contains anything more public-facing than a physical address, and I'm assuming you've already checked those."  
  
"Satellite and street images." Byers shrugged and shook his head, dropping back into the chair. "There's nothing to indicate what's inside any of those buildings. No signs, no street-facing glass."  
  
"Cars," Reid said, suddenly. "What about cars?"  
  
"He's got a point," Langly admitted, pulling up a street view of one of the addresses on the list. "Shit, this one's an office park. I'll run as many plates as I can make out, but don't expect a miracle. Plates are the second sacrifice to the panorama, too. The first is anything in motion. Still, let me see what I can do... You may want to grab Frohike. He might be able to make more out of these than I can."

* * *

Time passed, Frohike transcribing license plates, Reid comparing lists of names, Byers digging through the archives for similar themes.  
  
Langly reached over and tapped Reid's thigh, with the back of his hand. "First? I think I'm wrong. Second? Like a cheap screen door."  
  
"Like a very expensive and well-made screen door with a pneumatic closer," Reid retorted, nudging Langly's leg with his foot.  
  
"Yeah, that's still up to you, and if last time's any measure..." Langly's eyebrows arced up. "You get pretty wild."  
  
"I may have gotten a little ahead of myself," Reid admitted, setting aside another page. "I like to think I learn from my mistakes."  
  
"We'd all like to think that, and what am I doing anyway? Walking right into this." Langly sighed and rubbed his face.  
  
"If not Virginia, then where?" Reid asked, coming back around to the subject at hand.  
  
"I can't tell. Genuinely, literally, can't tell. There's no way to follow this back. God bless Switzerland." Langly threw his hands up in frustration. "No, I mean that, though. God bless Switzerland. I wouldn't be sitting here, right now, without Swiss data privacy laws. Unfortunately, our Hollyhock is also taking advantage of those same laws."  
  
"But, if it's just the law--" Reid started, but Langly cut him off.  
  
"No, the law means the data I'm looking for doesn't _exist_. It's not stored past the point necessary to deliver the message and confirm success to the sender, which is usually a matter of seconds. There's no logging." Langly groaned and reached for the bottle of pills in the top drawer. "And I might be able to get into the account, if I had any idea who it belonged to, but it would take about fifteen hundred years to brute force this, and after the third failed login, it would be eminently clear someone was trying to get in. And I know I can't get in the back way, here. There is no back way. I actually use this company for some things I didn't want to trace straight back to us, because I couldn't get into their shit. I can stop for a picnic in the middle of a DoD database, but the Swiss are equipped to hand me my ass. I can do the improbable with one hand tied behind my back, but without more information, this is actually _impossible_."  
  
"Assume we have the information. Assume we're working with, as you call it, a ghost. Assume, because you're right, people are stupid." Reid closed his eyes and tipped his head down, face blank. "If the correspondent is using a false identity, we're probably already holding the key. It's something this person associates with the name -- that's how people usually choose passwords, if they maintain multiple identities. I know this. It's about people, not computers. What are they trying to tell us?"  
  
"Something about the mind. Memory and delusion. Definitions of reality, right? But, a hollyhock, and I'll take your word for that, isn't holly. It's not even slightly related. It's some weird shit with huge pink flowers. Still sounds enough like holly to point that way, and our Holly isn't Holly, either. Oh, god, please let me be wrong." Langly took a deep breath. "Byers? What's the name of that shit Susanne was working on? Either one of them?"  
  
"Ergotamine-Histamine and, ah..." Byers stared at the ceiling. "It'll come back to me... Anoetic-Histamine! Why? You got something?"  
  
"Nah, just wanted the reminder, so I'd know it if I saw it! It's ... that kind of thing, isn't it? Memories and mind control and most of that didn't have anything to do with her work, but I want to be sure nobody's recreated it. That _that_ 's not what we're seeing in any of these."  
  
"You'd know better than I would!" The joke fell flat before it even passed Byers's lips.  
  
"Haha, oh, you're so funny, you prick," Langly huffed, staring at the new words on the screen. "Good length. Either of them would make a great password. Unfortunately, there's way too many variations. I've got one, maybe two tries."  
  
"Leave it," Reid suggested. "Try something else. If we need more information, where do we find that? Where else does this person exist in this form?"  
  
"I know you're right," Langly sighed, typing speed picking up as he had something he could do and do well. "This just bugs the shit out of me. I should be able to do this. What's the point in being the b-- Oh, shit, you're _kidding me_." A wicked smile spread across his face. "Guess who has a recovery email I _can_ get into..."  
  
Reid slid a page out of the pile on one side of him and compared it to the one in his other hand. "People are stupid. Everyone makes mistakes." _Us included_ , he thought, but kept it to himself.  
  
"Okay, so, if I do this? We're outed, but I'm in." Langly tipped his head back and forth, trying to decide. "Because the only way in is going to be to change the password, and I can't set that back. So, our correspondent's going to know they've been compromised."  
  
"What about what's in the easy one?" Reid asked, still checking names. The list seemed to go on forever, and there was only so much of it he could hold in the forefront of his mind at a time.  
  
"Location data from IP only, and those are all over the place. That's definitely a VPN, and probably Swiss-owned, so again, no logs... Message content, here, is limited. Mostly junk mail. This looks like a spamcatcher address. ... Wait. Some of these are companies you only get mail from if you buy from them." Langly sat up straighter. "Which means even if the purchase confirmations have been deleted, we know where to look."  
  
"You still don't have an answer about Virginia," Reid pointed out, with a hint of a smile.  
  
" _When_ I am right about Virginia, I expect you to worship me with your dick, like the god I am." Langly looked smug, finally in his element, once again, as the information poured in.  
  
"You say that like I'd need an excuse." Reid didn't even look up from the pages he held.  
  
Langly grinned, eyes never leaving the screen. "Can you say that a little louder? I don't think Frohike could hear you."  
  
"He'd never believe it anyway."  
  
"Everything's going to general delivery. It's all hold for pickup..." Langly's smile turned wicked. "I can flag this. We can go camp the post office the next time there's a-- No, we _can't_. Because we can't go out there. New plan. Whose cameras are aimed at that building, and can I get into them? Of course I can, we're not in fucking Switzerland. Probably cameras inside, too. Shouldn't be too hard to put eyes on the next pickup..."  
  
"Where?" Reid asked.  
  
Langly finally registered the part he'd forgotten he was looking for. "... Maryland."  
  
"Which?" Reid looked over with a tiny smile. "Is not Virginia."  
  
Langly leaned back in his chair. "Frohike? Send me that list of plates," he called across the room. "I'm going to go take a quick break. For my health. I suggest loud music. Back in an hour -- I've got good news."  
  
Frohike groaned loudly. "I suggest a ball gag."  
  
"Is anyone besides me aware of how disgusting those things taste?" Reid asked, arranging pages so he'd remember where he'd left off. "No? Lucky you."  
  
"Before we fall any further down this rabbithole," Byers cut in, "how good is the good news?"  
  
"If we leave this alone, for now, I'm pretty sure I can come up with photographs, inside a month. Once we have a face, facial recognition is terrible, but only because of the false positives. It'll find what we want, but Frohike's going to have to go back through whatever we come up with." Langly backed out of everything, taking copies of what he'd found, in case it wasn't there later. "I can't get too much further in, right now, without tripping some fairly serious alarms. We can go there, later, but I want to see what we're up against."  
  
" _Where_ are we up against?" Byers asked, with no small amount of concern.  
  
"Pretty much next door," Langly admitted. "There's a good chance this is a whistleblower. And that means there's a very good chance we're going to get a hit on that photo, assuming I can get one. We've waited this long. Another month or two isn't really going to matter. What do you have on the other end?"  
  
"Some of these companies are legitimate -- or at least they have legitimate fronts doing actual business. Property ownership is complicated. It's always complicated." Byers gestured frustratedly. "But, none of these names are names we know. We weren't dealing with these particular entities, which shouldn't be a surprise."  
  
"Because we made enough of a dent that they moved some people around and changed the name. Probably moved around a little, too." Frohike leaned in closer to the screen, as if squinting would be an improvement over the zoom function. "I've got like another ten of these. Go play your symphony in screaming fed, and I'll have it on your desk before you get back."  
  
"I am not that loud!" Reid insisted, knowing he was right, but that Frohike was also right because of the properties of the space. He let Langly lead him away from the dim hum of too many machines, back into the quieter depths of the building, that were about to become much louder. Some part of him felt like he should object to this, to protest that making a scene was unnecessary, and some point when Byers and Frohike weren't paying attention would be better, but the fact was they were going to hear it anyway, and better they should be awake and prepared to avoid hearing it. Still, knowing they could hear bothered him. Maybe he'd just... stop being so damned loud.


	13. Chapter 13

"I don't think I can do this, right now." The words fell out of Reid's mouth, as he and Langly crossed into the back room.  
  
"Okay." Langly turned on one foot and slammed his hip into the corner of the couch. "Have you had breakfast yet?"  
  
"I'm not really hungry." More than that, food sounded terrible.  
  
"Okay, you just went from trying to figure out if you won to looking like someone shot your dog, in the last five minutes," Langly pointed out. "You want to tell me what's going on?"  
  
"I'm still not comfortable knowing they can hear everything. Even less comfortable with you announcing it. There are parts of my life I prefer to keep among the people directly involved in them." Reid's fingers rubbed nervously at his elbows.  
  
"I got carried away, and I forgot that was even a thing people worried about. I mean, never mind what a good job I did for how many years. If we don't fuck in my house because of them, I will be extremely disappointed, but I'll live. Your apartment's only a crime scene for a few more days." Langly shrugged, as casually as he could manage. "But, let me bring this back around to a point you were making, earlier. Performance as control, under constant observation. You've been doing it, already. You play masterfully against Frohike. You don't want to screw? We'll do something else. But, let's give them something to talk about. A performance no one will ever ask about, for fear we'll _tell them_."  
  
"You know, speaking of performance, I never finished telling you about that dream." Reid's lips quirked in distant amusement. "Maybe you're right. Maybe there's something to be said for continuing the trend."  
  
"Let's get out of the last public space, before you start talking. I would like there to be zero chances of anyone else getting to hear you talk about naked Bowie." Langly held out a hand and Reid took it.  
  
"I never said anything about naked Bowie, but I see how you could get there from what I did say." Reid let himself be led by the hand, Langly walking backward ahead of him.  
  
"You're right," Langly said, after a moment, blinking. "You were talking about having dreams that were like Labyrinth in _theme_ , not content. But, once you brought the Goblin King into it, I was distracted by his tight pants."  
  
"Just in case you were thinking it, you will _never_ get me into anything that tight. It is not going to happen."  
  
"Why would I need to try? I get to see _you_ naked." Langly laughed and pulled Reid the last few inches into the room, reaching past him to close the door. "So, this dream where Bowie isn't naked..."  
  
"Lie down with me?" Reid looked uneasy. "The more I think back on this, the less comfortable I am with it, and it's making me dizzy. I mean, it was a fantastic dream! Everything was great, in context! But, I think I ruined it by waking up."  
  
"Okay, the most important word I heard in that sentence was 'dizzy', and you should definitely at least sit down." Langly got out of the way and gestured at the side of the bed. "Warm water or cold water?"  
  
"Cold water," Reid said, as he sat, leaning forward to fold his hands behind his neck. "Wait. No water. What? I'm fine."  
  
"That is not the response of someone who is fine. Trust me. I'm a specialist in not fine. You're going to stay right there and keep breathing. I'm going to get a glass of water." Langly bolted from the room.  
  
As Reid reminded himself that there were any number of things that weren't happening, including the events of that dream, Langly ran back in with a thermos bottle in one hand, tripped over the unfinished half inch where the floor raised in the doorway, and slid across the floor on his knees.  
  
"Complete with dramatic entrance." Langly smiled, lopsidedly, stumbling to his feet to close the last of the distance. He offered Reid the bottle and sat just a little further than he might have, otherwise.  
  
"That sounded like it hurt." Reid took the bottle and looked at it, realising it was lidded. "You meant to do that, didn't you?"  
  
"No, I just figured I've got the coordination of a pinball, when my mind's on other things, and I shouldn't be running with open liquids." Langly straightened his glasses. "And I'm right. And, no one is surprised."  
  
Reid took a long swallow of icy water.  
  
"You know, if it flips you out this bad, you could just... not tell this story. I don't have any legitimate need to know about your naked Bowie dreams, however much I'd like to hear about them." Langly leaned back, propping himself up on his elbows.  
  
"No, I actually do want to tell you. It's just... it was so enjoyable, while I was dreaming it, and the more I look at it, the more horrifying and wrong it becomes." Reid set the bottle between his feet and stared down at it. "It almost feels like a warning. The longer I spend with you, the more I start ... losing some part of myself. And I don't know if that's a bad thing. I was definitely using that part, but do I need it? Is it helping me, or am I just so used to being like this that I don't want to be anything else?"  
  
"Temporary insanity," Langly decided. "It's been a hell of a week. You'll be fine, once you get home, settle back in. Everything's fucked up, and you're doing the best you can."  
  
"Thank you." Reid's next breath unfolded his body, and he leaned back, landing next to Langly. "Perspective. You're probably right."  
  
"Like I said, I'm a specialist in not fine. If I had a college degree it would be a Bachelors of What the Fuck This Is Not Okay. Is that Social Sciences? I feel like that's probably Social Sciences."  
  
"Probably a fork of psychology. Maybe sociology, depending on the application." Reid could almost manage a smile, and he changed the subject too fast to give himself the time to react. "It was a dream about a window."  
  
"Naked and window. I can see where this goes wrong, already."  
  
"I mean, I'm pretty sure that's just channelling recent events -- stripped naked in my own home by a stranger with a gun, suddenly staying somewhere with two people who not only hear it but have something to say about it every time I have sex..." Reid rubbed his face and left his hands there.  
  
"To be fair, you were already pretty naked. I don't know if that part counts as 'stripped'."  
  
"I had a blanket up to my neck!" Reid protested, pulling his hands out of the way of the increasing volume of his voice. "I woke up because she pulled it off me! Yeah, I think it counts!"  
  
Langly shuddered hard enough that Reid could feel it through the mattress. "Okay, got me there. I forgot I pulled that back up, when I got up."  
  
Reid blinked, turning his head to study Langly. "Did you? You must have. I hadn't even thought about that."  
  
"Listen, you can talk all you want about how you should've taken a picture to prove I'm gorgeous, but you'd be sadly disappointed in that picture when it did not show your weirdo hallucinations. What should have been a picture was you curled up in that chair, sleeping. I've seen kittens less cute. I'd have printed that out and framed it on the nightstand." Langly looked more serious than he sounded. "So, yeah, I pulled the blanket back up and tucked it under your hand so it wouldn't slide back down. And then I just watched you sleep, for a minute or two, before I went to call Byers. You just... you looked happy."  
  
"I think I had a pretty good reason to be happy. Sure, I hallucinated half of it, but I'm not sure how much that really matters, in the end." Reid closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, half an embarrassed smile pulling on the corner of his mouth. "In my dreams, you glow. And I know that was just the way the light comes in that window, but it looked so good on you..."  
  
"You cannot imagine how glad I am that Frohike will never hear those words." Langly laughed. "The glowing part, I mean. You can tell him I make you happy any time."  
  
"Good, because you do." Reid swallowed and sat up, again, reaching for the water. "It's a dream about being happy. I'm happy in it. I've never felt so good in or out of a dream, and it feels _real_. That probably doesn't make sense. Not the dream, the happiness. It's consistent. It's not that thing where you'd be happy if you weren't so tired or you've got the endorphin rush, but everything is still terrible. It's just... _good_. Which would be great, if the rest of it wasn't so uncomfortable."  
  
"So, tell me the good parts, if there are any." Langly leaned to the side to free up one arm, and tossed his glasses onto the nightstand.  
  
"Well, you're there, and we're having amazing sex. You're inside me. Your hands are all over me. I'm so close... It's incredible."  
  
"Okay, that definitely sounds like the good part. I'm so here for this."  
  
Reid took a drink of water before he started talking again. "Except you're behind me, which is a no. But, that could change, just not any time soon. And in front of me... I'm pressed against a window -- just a huge pane of glass, looking out over the city, and it's snowing. And it's a fantastic view, but I'm completely naked and the glass is freezing. But, it's a dream, so this still feels good, for some reason."  
  
"Freezing your dick off against an icy panoramic view... I don't think I could keep a stiffy even in a dream." Langly laughed and shook his head. "Of course, given the dreams I've had, I don't get to talk."  
  
"The chill's part of it. The catch and slide against the condensation... I don't think the cold glass is the problem, really. I could probably talk myself into cold glass. It's the outside looking in, being put on display." More water, just to wash the taste of the words out of his mouth. "Except, in the dream, that's what I want. I want to be seen. I want to be recognised, there, on the verge of orgasm, with someone else's hands on me and warm lube running down the inside of my thighs--" Reid sighed, folding in on himself. "And I know what that is too."  
  
"You want the world to respect your sexual autonomy?" Langly chuffed in amusement, following that line straight through. " _You're_ still pissed almost everyone on your team threatened me, when they figured out we were fucking. Which isn't about me, it's about you. It's about how they think about you. It's why you got pissed when I called you 'boy genius'."  
  
"I'm neither a child nor a curiosity. I'm a grown man and I enjoy sex. And I can mostly take care of myself, occasional work-related mayhem aside. I'm not delicate, and I don't need to be coddled! And just maybe I'd like it if the jokes about _my_ relationships were peer humour, like everyone else's, and not the kind of jokes your aunt makes at Christmas dinner!" Reid paused and looked over his shoulder at Langly. "Not your aunt. I don't know your aunt. Do I have to worry about meeting your aunts?"  
  
"Assume I'm an orphan. At this point, I'm dead, and you've met my whole family. They're in the other room."  
  
"It's still a good dream," Reid insisted, taking another drink before he capped the bottle and set it back on the floor.  
  
"It's a wet dream. Those always count, no matter how weird they are."  
  
"Except it wasn't!"  
  
"I can't even remember this morning except that I was sweaty and you were right where I wanted you, except I had something that was going to be a headache if I didn't do something about it. Wasn't exactly paying attention to where the wet spot wasn't."  
  
"I thought about waking you up," Reid admitted, "but, you seemed so comfortable. And I just... it's not something that happens to me often. I just wanted to enjoy having you there."  
  
"Says the guy who isn't into cuddling," Langly teased.  
  
"I just said I was changing. Maybe I do like it. Maybe I want to wake up wrapped around someone I actually want to touch." Reid folded his arms across his knees. "You have to realise I've had more sex with you than I've ever had in my life. And I've never had a relationship this... physical. Everything's been long-distance, maybe a couple of days in the same city, a few hours in the same room..."  
  
"And I'm usually only good for a five-minute fling, including the hellos." Langly shrugged. "I'm just as lost as you are. No expectations, though, so we can just make shit up as we go along, and who cares what anybody else thinks." He sat back up. "You going to flip out if I touch you?"  
  
"Probably not."  
  
"Good, because you look like you need a hug." Langly tossed an arm across Reid's back, rested his chin on Reid's shoulder.  
  
"I could get used to this."  
  
"Observation suggests you already _are_ getting used to this," Langly pointed out.  
  
"This is not a position particularly conducive to me kissing you," Reid decided, after a moment.  
  
"If that's something you want to do, we should do something about that."  
  
Reid straightened up carefully, not to elbow Langly as he turned to pull him closer. "You follow what I'm thinking so often, when I'm not six steps ahead and sideways to what you're thinking."  
  
"It's because I shotgunned your entire life history over the course of about three days and six gallons of coffee," Langly admitted. "I can put most of the pieces together, if you start the thought. Byers is way more dangerous, though. He's better at the people stuff."  
  
"Don't get me wrong, it's completely uncanny, but I kind of like it. Saves a lot of time on explaining myself."  
  
"Why should you explain yourself? You just make sense. I mean, that last one was kind of glaring. I was the recipient of the scary dad speech three times in about an hour and a half."  
  
"I'm still sorry about that." Reid rested his forehead against Langly's.  
  
"Hey, you got it from Byers." Langly shrugged. "And he can just shut the fuck up. As if he has _ever_ made better choices..."  
  
"No, what I got from Byers was a little different. He wanted me to understand you. Made sure I had the right word in mind for your motivations."  
  
"And what the hell does Byers think he knows, that I didn't tell you?"  
  
"Respect."  
  
Langly blinked. "Oh. Yeah, okay, he was right. Didn't think I had to say it. Why, what did you think?"  
  
"I'm pretty cute. I'm also mostly an academic. I was still sort of stuck on the idea that I came off easy, if bright enough to be interesting for a while." Reid cleared his throat. "I mean, I came on pretty strong."  
  
"You came on pretty awkward, you mean. Part of the appeal."  
  
Reid groaned and tried to duck, but Langly caught his chin with a finger and pressed a kiss to the bridge of his nose.  
  
"But, yeah, I went through everything, after you left, and... What can I say? I was impressed. And I don't think you really get to say you're mostly an academic, any more. You've been shot three times. You've been to hell and back. You're a goddamn adventurer is what you are. You're like the Indiana Jones of feds, which, I mean, Mulder, too, but you're way better looking. And smarter. And for bonus points, totally unlike Mulder, you were hitting on me, and you weren't drugged or drunk."  
  
"Cute and easy," Reid sighed.  
  
"No, no, you're looking at the wrong part of that. I mean, yes, you're cute, but you're ... I've had easy. I've _been_ easy. You're like a pomegranate -- anything but easy, slow as hell, but every bit's worth it. ...Fruit. Why is it always fruit?" Langly moved his hand to Reid's shoulder. "Anyway, I was awestruck. The bathroom wall didn't even matter. I just wanted to know you. I just wanted to listen to you tell me all the things that didn't make it to paper. I wanted to know how the hell you were still alive, most of all, and as someone who got killed on paper and almost got killed in a wide variety of stupid accidents before that, I have the utmost respect for the obscene amount of willpower and focus it takes to not die. That doesn't sound right either."  
  
"You probably could have stopped at pomegranate and been fine," Reid teased, pausing a moment before he tipped his head and kissed Langly.  
  
"You're magical," Langly breathed into the kiss. "Unbelievable."  
  
Reid made a disbelieving sound, and Langly pulled back just a little.  
  
"Probably not perfect, but who the hell am I to demand perfection? Who the hell am I to turn down magic?"  
  
"I'm not magical," Reid protested.  
  
"By some variant of Clarke's third law, you absolutely are. Any sufficiently advanced fed is indistinguishable from magic. I don't have to understand it, I just have to appreciate it."  
  
"The next time Frohike has something to say about this, I'm telling him it's Clarke's second law, and we're venturing into the impossible."  
  
"Okay, it is technically possible that you actually _are_ perfect." Langly laughed and closed the space between them again.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy christ, it's FIVE THOUSAND WORDS OF DISASTER PORN.

They lay tangled together on the bed, Reid's shirt unbuttoned and his thigh wedged between Langly's, as Langly licked and nipped at his chest. This would be a reason for another shower, Reid thought, but that was another benefit to coastal living -- another shower was always a thing he could have.  
  
"Definitely liking this making it up as we go thing," Reid decided, one hand rubbing the base of Langly's skull and the other pinned awkwardly between them. "Wasn't sure about this part. It just sounded... damp. But, you're making a very convincing case for it!"  
  
Langly looked up. "This would be even better if you didn't taste like soap and panic, but that is the only complaint I have, and one easily remedied with time. Or more licking. Or possibly a lemon. Lemon? Lemon." He nodded. "Pineapple would be sticky."  
  
"Not sure how I feel about being covered in fruit. Definitely not okay with sticky." Reid looked amused at the idea. " _Pineapple_?"  
  
Langly shrugged defensively. "I'm sorry, are you the one licking you? I don't think so. Pineapple. I'd suck your dick if I could do it with a mouthful of pineapple soda."  
  
"Absolutely not." Reid's response was instant. "No. There are places citrus does not belong, and that is one of them. And that sounds like a disaster, anyway. And sticky. That... no. That sounds horrible."  
  
"Fine, no pineapple." Langly rolled his eyes and caught Reid's nipple in his teeth, flicking it with his tongue.  
  
Reid's hand clenched in Langly's hair. His eyes rolled back and his head followed. Opening his mouth yielded no words, but only a few sharp, gasping breaths.  
  
"You all right?" Langly stayed very still, in no small part because any sensible motion would have ripped his hair out.  
  
"I'm..." Reid blinked into the depths of the room, behind himself.  "Do that again?"  
  
"Let go of my hair and I'll think about it."  
  
"Sorry." Reid loosened his grip, working his hand out of Langly's hair, bringing it down to clutch at Langly's hip, instead.  
  
This time, Langly devoted himself to the cause, teeth and tongue, nibbling and licking. He could feel Reid's hips roll, pressing hard against him as Reid's hand gripped his hip mercilessly. Spurred on by the response, he hummed, pleased, letting the sound vibrate through his teeth.  
  
"Oh my god," Reid choked out. "Touch me. Just touch me. More. Now."  
  
Langly rolled his shoulder to free up the arm he was laying on, bringing his hand up to toy with Reid's other nipple. He knew that wasn't what Reid was asking for, and he was absolutely willing to incur whatever wrath might follow, if he didn't finish that thought fast enough. But, his other hand slipped between them easily, as Reid writhed against him, panting and gasping, and Langly slowly opened Reid's trousers with one hand, fingers teasing as he moved, leaving more than enough time for Reid to slap his hand away.  
  
But, Reid thrust himself against that hand, ground hard against Langly's palm, even with the zipper still in the way. The bite of metal made his hips stutter, and when he jerked back, Langly's hand followed, shoving cloth out of the way to put fingers against his skin. Still, Reid remained nearly soundless, all gasps and stuttered breaths as stars swam across his eyes.  
  
" _Please_ ," he begged, and the ragged sound of his own voice snapped him out of the moment in horror, his entire body recoiling as one hand leapt up to cover his mouth, before he came back to where he was and what was real.  
  
Again, Langly stopped moving, pulling back just enough to speak. "You want to tell me what that was?"  
  
"No." Reid panted and shuddered.  
  
"You okay?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"You want me to stop?"  
  
Silence hung between them for a long moment. "No, but..."  
  
Langly hummed inquisitively, waiting for the rest of that sentence before he did anything else.  
  
"You should stop wearing so much." A shaky laugh fell out of Reid's mouth. "I should stop wearing so much."  
  
"And here I thought we were breaking in your new clothes," Langly teased, taking his hand back and rolling away from Reid, as he opened his own jeans. "Takes a little rough use, before the cloth sits right."  
  
"And this is where I'm not like cloth," Reid quipped, shrugging out of his shirt. "A little rough use, and I _stop_ sitting right."  
  
Langly sputtered his way into a cackle, kicking off his jeans.  
  
Standing to remove the rest of his clothes, Reid looked at himself, at the bandages still on his arms, fingers finding a few familiar scars, as he counted years, checked for unaccountable spaces between things. "I'm all right," he said, even though Langly hadn't asked.  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"I'm at least convinced this is real." Reid rested his knee on the edge of the bed.  
  
"It fucking better be, or I'm going to be pissed." Langly laughed, studying Reid before he made a decision. Half sitting, he grabbed his shirt and laid down out of it. "C'mere."  
  
" _You_ sure?" Reid's eyes traced over the unbroken spread of Langly's blue-lined, plaster-white skin.  
  
"No, but I'm gonna do it anyway." Langly held out a hand and Reid stepped into it, letting himself be pulled until he knelt across Langly's thighs.  
  
"Now, where was I before I lost myself?" Reid asked, leaning down and resting his elbows above Langly's shoulders.  
  
"Telling me what you wanted." A hint of a smile flicked across Langly's face. "At least I think that's where that thought would've ended."  
  
"What do I want? Oh, let's start small. I want you to kiss me." Reid stretched, elbows catching on the sheet as he sank into kissing distance. "I've always liked kissing. Objectively disgusting, but it feels so good I'm willing to ignore that fact."  
  
Langly choked on a laugh. "It is pretty gross, isn't it?"  
  
"Yeah, a little!"  
  
"Come to the Dark Side. We've got more tongue." Langly slid a hand up Reid's back, pressing encouragingly on the back of his neck, until their lips met.  
  
Warmer, now, a little more sure of himself and reality, Reid tipped his head to the side, nipping at Langly's jaw. "Put your hands on me," he breathed. "Touch me like you want to know me."  
  
"In the biblical sense," Langly quipped with his last remaining brain cells, as Reid's lips moved down his neck, teeth and tongue tracing the edges of his collarbone. One hand traced Reid's back, fingers finding all the skin-blunted edges of bone, and the other hand caressed a slender thigh, thumb rising to the curve of the hip, pressing in a way that made Reid gasp and twitch.  
  
"That's not the one you want." Reid shook his head, forehead rolling against Langly's chest. He shifted his weight and reached for Langly's hand, pulling it up to his back and pressing one finger to either side of his spine. "There."  
  
Langly spread his hand, making sure he could find that spot again, before he brought his fingers back to it, with slowly increasing pressure. In seconds, Reid's hips canted up, pressing back against those fingers, his breath reduced to shallow pants as his jaw locked open, leaving him to drool against Langly's chest. When the pants became a desperate, jagged whine, Langly eased his fingers back, gently rubbing Reid's lower back.  
  
"That's a weird one. How do you even know that?" Langly asked, as Reid pushed himself up, shivering and embarrassed, wiping the drool off his cheek with one hand.  
  
"Let's just say there was an extremely embarrassing accident, and I have never forgotten where that is." Reid looked down at the small puddle on Langly's chest. "Sorry. I forgot that's... I kind of..."  
  
Langly reached over and grabbed his own discarded shirt and wiped the spit off his chest. "Reid? Look at me. Do you have any idea how hot that was?"  
  
"You didn't stop because I was drooling all over you?" Reid scoffed.  
  
"No, I stopped because I wasn't sure about the completely incoherent noise you were making." Langly caught the flash of panic in Reid's eyes. "Quiet, I swear. But, a little nerve-wracking."  
  
"Sorry. Good noise, I promise." Reid cleared his throat and looked away. "I can... just from that. Maybe not in this position, but..."  
  
Langly's face lit up like he'd been hit with an entire calendar of holidays. " _Seriously_? You absolutely have to teach me that, some time. How to do it right, I mean. That's-- I'm telling you, that was amazing to watch. Ten of ten, would do that again, any time, in any position you want."  
  
Reid laughed and rested his forehead of Langly's chest, again. "You're out of your mind."  
  
"So are you," Langly retorted. "Pretty sure that's not relevant."  
  
Reid changed the subject with a quick flick of his tongue across Langly's nipple. The change in perspective registered before the sound of the slap, and before he felt the sting in his cheek, that hand was already clapped over Langly's mouth.  
  
"Oh, shit." Langly inhaled shakily. "Oh, shit, I'm so sorry."  
  
"I'm going to take that as a 'no'." Reid blinked a few times and took a deep breath, before he looked back to where Langly seemed to have sunk into the bed, eyes wide with horror.  
  
"I'm so sorry," Langly said, again.  
  
"Pretty sure I walked into that one," Reid admitted, prodding his own cheek. "I should've said something first. I knew better. You're the only person I've ever seen wear a shirt in a bathtub, just to avoid skin contact."  
  
"Still sorry," Langly insisted. "I don't even know what happened. Everything was fine, and then it was too late. I just felt the sting in my hand. What the hell did you even do?"  
  
"You gave me such a good time, I decided nipples were a good idea." Reid cleared his throat and blinked a couple of times. " _Yours_ aren't. And I really should have known that. I wasn't thinking."  
  
"I _hope_ you weren't thinking," Langly scoffed, hand finally lifting off his mouth to gently touch Reid's cheek. "I'd have serious concerns about my skills if you had a whole two brain cells to rub together at that point." He paused, eyes serious. "You sure you're all right?"  
  
"You know, I think this is kind of par for the course. I was going to start wondering, if something didn't go horribly wrong, soon. We're not in the chair, so it couldn't be chair accidents. I think one person shooting at us is enough for one lifetime. My turn to be stupid." Reid turned his head and kissed Langly's palm. "That doesn't look like it's going to bruise, does it? I really don't want to have to explain how I almost got my face smacked off doing something I shouldn't have been doing."  
  
"Oh my god, they're all going to kill me." Langly's hand dropped to cover his eyes.  
  
"If I smile when I ask if they want to know, the answer will be no." Reid leaned down and kissed Langly's knuckles. "Do you want to put your shirt back on?"  
  
"Not really." Langly sighed and stretched. "Just... don't surprise me?"  
  
"Yeah, I think I got that one."  
  
"I'm still sorry."  
  
"I'm fine. I promise." Reid looked down the space between them and then back up. "I'm just... we should switch places. I'm a little nervous about leaning on you wrong, after that."  
  
"That's probably reasonable," Langly admitted, waiting for Reid to move, before he followed, pausing to just look, for a long moment. "You're still incredible. Even more incredible, after that."  
  
"Let's not make a habit of it. Either of us."  
  
"Definitely not."  
  
Reid reached up and wrapped Langly's hair around his hand, tugging gently down. "Wasn't there something about me winning a bet?"  
  
"Do you actually expect me to get it up after that?" Langly laughed weakly.  
  
"I was thinking if I applied a little effort, you wouldn't have enough brain cells left to worry about it." Reid smiled impishly.  
  
"I'm willing to give this plan due consideration." A faint smile caught at the corners of Langly's lips. "Impress me."  
  
This time, Reid moved slowly, pulling Langly down into a warm kiss, one hand still wrapped in Langly's hair and the other gently kneading his thigh. Thighs had been a relatively safe option, to date. As Langly began to relax, never quite closing the gap between them, Reid's hand moved up, kneading Langly's bony ass.  
  
"Tell me," Langly breathed into the kiss. "Tell me what you want."  
  
Reid's first response was nearly reflexive. "You."  
  
Langly broke the kiss with a breathy laugh, and Reid blinked.  
  
"Wow, I'm helpful, today." Reid chuckled, almost embarrassed.  
  
"No, that was good," Langly caught his breath. "Definitely more coherent than I've gotten out of you, a few times."  
  
"You're distracting!"  
  
"Good!"  
  
Reid's hand moved up, again, tracing circles on Langly's lower back. "Think you can not slap my teeth out, if I try this?"  
  
"Lift your arms up a sec?" Langly asked, and as Reid did, he worked his wrists under Reid's shoulders. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen again."  
  
"You okay with me trying this?"  
  
"Looked good on you." Langly stole a quick kiss. "I'm game."  
  
Reid worked his fingertips against the notches in the bone, a little more pressure with each stroke, until Langly went from absently purring at the touch to a raw sob of pleasure. "You all right?"  
  
"I am so good right now, I'm probably drooling," Langly panted against Reid's neck. "I didn't even know this was possible, and I've still been waiting my entire goddamn life for someone to touch me like that. I'm sorry, I'm about to get loud enough for both of us, if you keep doing that."  
  
"You want me to stop?"  
  
"Do I want you to-- _No?_ " Langly sounded offended at the very thought. "Not only do I not want you to stop, I'm already working on combinations of this with other things that would make me come unbelievably hard and inexcusably fast."  
  
A wicked smile crossed Reid's lips. "Twelve seconds. In public."  
  
"Hell. Yes." Langly untangled one arm and reached for his shirt again, to swab at the growing pool between Reid's hips. "Look at this, you've got two fingers on me, and I'm already--"  
  
Reid let go of Langly's hair to pull the shirt out of his hand and toss it up the bed. "Hot. Extremely hot. I am so into that, you cannot possibly imagine how into that I am. Right now. With you."  
  
"Might be a little concerned if you were into it right now with someone else," Langly teased, before Reid's fingers pressed into his back again, the pleasant shiver along his spine compounded by the icy shiver that followed, as his chest pressed flat against Reid's. Too much -- much too much -- but the trembling in his arms and upper back kept a tense balance with the pleasure pooling between his hips and pouring out of him. Dribbling, probably, but still. He was well aware of the puddle between them, every time his hips twitched and his flesh dragged through it.  
  
Reid reached up and twisted Langly's hair around his free hand, tossing it up over Langly's shoulder and out of both of their faces, receiving a muffled sound of appreciation in reply. "I want to hold you like this, while you're inside me."  
  
Langly's first response was a groan of frustration, forced through his teeth. "Twelve. Seconds."  
  
"If even that." Reid sounded in absolutely no way discouraged.  
  
"We are at the wrong end of the bed for me to reach the lube, and I am ... seriously considering doing something painfully stupid."  
  
"I was considering disgustingly stupid."  
  
"I'm not doing anything you're going to regret once you have a brain again," Langly warned, eyes squeezed shut as he struggled to put those words in order.  
  
"Then one of us has to move, and I'm pretty sure that's you, because I can't get up unless you do," Reid pointed out, lessening the pressure of his fingers and feeling Langly's weight lift off him. "How sore are you, still?"  
  
"Enough that I should care, but not enough that I actually do," Langly admitted, regretfully freeing up his other hand and awkwardly staggering to his feet to approach the bed at a more reasonable angle than half-sideways across the foot of it. "I thought you won that bet."  
  
Reid made his way up the bed, pausing to drop a kiss on the point of Langly's hip. "I did, but twelve seconds, and I'm not going to be that quick, this time."  
  
Langly looked reverently up at him. "Please be right."  
  
"Oh, I will be, if I have to pinch myself to make it happen." Reid grabbed Langly's shoulder and rolled to the side, pulling him up.  
  
"This is exactly what I was talking about. You know what you want, well beyond the bounds of what's actually a good idea," Langly warned, nipping his way down Reid's neck.  
  
"It's not that far out! Maybe not the suggested method, but I'm sure it'll work!" Reid laughed and wrapped his arms loosely around Langly, ready to move them when the shuddering began.  
  
Langly worked his way down, pausing just before he pressed his tongue to Reid's nipple. "Please don't smack me."  
  
"I'm not you," Reid reminded him, somewhat tartly.  
  
"I deserved that."  
  
"You did."  
  
Langly offered his apologies again, this time in the form of tongue and teeth, which Reid was quick to accept, to demand, even, his hands clutching at Langly's hair and shoulder. Langly bit and Reid arched, writhing at the flick of tongue across his skin.  
  
"Remind we why we stopped doing this?" Langly asked, as Reid was reduced to guttural sounds.  
  
"My shirt was in the way," Reid panted, aiming for enough of a reason, but not too much, lest this stop again.  
  
"Proposed: spandex. Boob window." Langly used his teeth for punctuation and Reid bucked under him.  
  
"Rejected. What did I say about me and tight clothing?"  
  
"You said I couldn't dress you up as the Goblin King," Langly reminded him, one hand slipping between them to curl under the hot weight of Reid's shaft, thumb circling the tip.  
  
Reid writhed, one hand clenched in Langly's hair. "I thought you wanted me to last longer than you."  
  
"As long as you don't get ahead of yourself, this time, you will."  
  
Reid tugged at Langly's hair. "Get up here and kiss me."  
  
"You convinced me to slow down," Langly murmured, nipping at Reid's lip. "Looks like I'm a monster of your own making."  
  
"Keep this up and you're not going to be able to sit down when I'm done with you, speaking of making monsters."  
  
"Neither are you, if you're not careful."  
  
Reid took a deep breath. "You're right. I know you're right."  
  
"Tell me what you want."  
  
"Kiss me." Reid sounded certain. "Kiss me and put your fingers in me."  
  
The kiss was second nature, even as Langly groped for his shirt to wipe his hand off before he poured lube down his fingers, letting the trickle start just behind Reid's balls and run down. As his fingers followed, Reid breathed a word into his mouth.  
  
"Careful."  
  
"I remember," Langly promised, his fingers dipping lower, teasing and toying with a purpose.  
  
As those fingers pressed in -- first one, then another -- a quiet sound slipped out of Reid, barely more than another breath in an increasingly sloppy kiss. He clenched, relaxed, clenched again, and dropped his hips, and this time Langly could feel the resulting moan vibrate through his skull, where their lips weren't buffer enough.  
  
"Good sound?" Langly asked, pulling back just enough for words.  
  
"Yeah," Reid panted, hands skimming and glancing off Langly's back, as if unwilling to grab and maybe break. "I want-- Do the thing with your knuckles again?"  
  
Langly made the slightest motion. "This?"  
  
"Ohyespleasethat." The words poured out in a single breath. "Kiss me. Taste me. Just put your mouth on me."  
  
Langly started slow, lips first as he worked his way down, fingers gently working Reid open. By the time Langly's mouth had settled on Reid's nipple, again, he'd eased a third finger in, and every sound Reid made still sounded good. For a while, they moved together, Langly's motions growing bolder as Reid bucked and writhed at his touch.  
  
"Langly." Reid's voice was suddenly sharp and clear.  
  
"Hmm?" Langly looked up, inquisitively, gently tugging the nipple held in his teeth.  
  
"Fuck me."  
  
Langly's mouth opened as he considered the appropriate response, and Reid shivered at the sudden loss of tension. "Are you absolutely sure?"  
  
"I was absolutely sure last time too," Reid reminded him. "But, yeah. Yeah, I'm ... pretty sure we've hit 'right now or take your hands the hell off me'. Which is... something you'll learn to hate just as much as I do."  
  
"I thought you hadn't done this before." Langly looked slightly confused as he tried to manage a condom one-handed.  
  
"I hadn't. It just translates well." Reid looked anything but thrilled with that fact. "Ask me later."  
  
Langly shifted into an entirely awkward position to free up one hand to grab the lube. "Pick your knee up-- That should work. And... out."  
  
Reid took a long, jagged breath, and Langly waited for the next to push in, the first bit gaining him a sound just as agonised as the first time.  
  
"I'm fine," Reid panted. "I'm fine."  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"It'll be easy, next time. Do you know how many muscles you just... never think about? I missed one." Reid reached up and tugged at Langly's hair. "Come down here and kiss me more. I can't quite reach, yet."  
  
Langly eased himself in, slow, short thrusts, until he felt Reid's hand splay across his lower back. The fact that Reid hadn't clamped down in a death grip around him definitely made it easier not to go off before he'd gotten all the way in, at least, but he watched the grip Reid's other hand had on the top of the mattress.  
  
"Kiss me," Reid said, again, fingers finding where they belonged.  
  
Langly leaned down until his chest met Reid's, until his lips met Reid's, and then those fingers pressed into the back of his hips and the world melted and slid sideways. His hips jerked and Reid's hand encouraged the motion, fingertips pressing him down, pursuing that pressure back up. And here was that rhythmic clutch as Reid's body tried to adapt to the jarring thrusts, and Langly knew he should slow down, his entire body trembling in complete overload as Reid held him close, pressed just a little harder.  
  
And suddenly everything felt like falling. Langly choked on his next breath, his entire body suddenly still except for that double pulse, first his heart and then his dick, and everything smelled like Reid. That was it, he was sure. He was going to die like this, and it was going to have been a life worth living, a death worth having.  
  
"Langly?" Reid's voice filtered into his consciousness. "You okay?"  
  
"Ask me that tomorrow," Langly panted, slowly coming to the realisation that his entire body was shivering and shaking. "Weren't you going to have your wicked way with me?"  
  
"I'm not so sure that's a good idea." Reid sounded concerned, more than anything.  
  
"I am." Langly managed to push himself up on shaking arms, face flushed blotchy, even as he could feel himself starting to slip out of Reid. "Look, if you get to ask me to trust in your stupid-ass decisions, I'm going to demand the same consideration."  
  
"Then you're going to have to move about three inches that way." Reid gestured toward their feet. "I'm not that flexible."  
  
Langly finally slipped out, laughing, and his attempt to sit up left him sprawled back the other way on the bed. "I'm not getting up again."  
  
Reid found the shirt Langly definitely wasn't putting back on and wiped himself off with one hand as he reached into the drawer for another condom. "You're out," he realised, after a long moment's fumbling.  
  
"The hell I am." Langly pitched the knotted condom of the side of the bed and pushed himself up on his elbows.  
  
Reid leaned over to look in the drawer. "No, really."  
  
Langly tipped his head back, staring at the ceiling for a long, deep breath. "I don't care, if you don't. The only place you've been since that last test is here."  
  
"I might care..."  
  
"The shower is less than twenty feet away from where you are right now."  
  
"How many stupid decisions can two geniuses make in one day?" Reid muttered, taking a deep breath and grabbing the lube, with one more look at his bandaged forearms. "At least one more."  
  
"That's the spirit!" Langly laughed, bringing up one knee and tossing his other leg to the side.  
  
Reid poured lube into his palm, tipping it down his fingers. "If I end up with a urinary tract infection, I am holding you personally responsible for every moment of agony."  
  
"Listen, yes, it could happen, but it's not that likely. And I know you know that, because I'm pretty sure you know the statistics on everything you could possibly catch from touching anyone, anywhere."  
  
"Not... everything," Reid admitted, eyes travelling the length of Langly's body. "Quick, change the subject, or I'm not going to be able to do this at all."  
  
"You're smart, you're hot, and I want you to fuck me until I can't see straight."  
  
Reid rested his palm on Langly's balls, curling his fingers along the flesh below. "You already can't see. You've had your glasses off this whole time."  
  
Langly's mouth opened and he blinked dumbly. "Assume I'd have something witty to say, if your fingers were literally anywhere else."  
  
Reid's fingers suggested they might have somewhere else to be. "How slow do I need to take this?"  
  
"On a scale of one to ten? Zero. This is the most relaxed you will ever get me, except maybe five minutes ago."  
  
Reid slipped his fingers in and curled them, and a small, needy sound broke against the inside of Langly's lips.  
  
"You still want me, after all that?" Reid teased, fingers circling the spot he knew drove Langly wild, watching the change in Langly's breathing, the way his heel dug into the mattress.  
  
"I want you to fuck me so hard the only thing I feel when I think of Kimmy is _pity_."  
  
"Pretty sure we've already hit that point." Reid squeaked at the sudden splash of cold lube against his bare skin -- another reminder of what he was about to do.  
  
"I'm only up to regret. We can do better," Langly panted, staring at the wall behind him and trying to figure out how to avoid losing his mind in the next however long Reid decided to be a wicked tease. A flick of tongue over his lip chased a low moan out of his mouth as Reid's fingers stroked just where he wanted them most, and he moved his elbows, sprawling against the bed again, as he pulled one knee up to his shoulder, arm hooked under it.  
  
"Out," Reid warned, and Langly's body reacted before his mind turned the sounds into a word.  
  
By the time Langly recovered enough of his breath to comment, Reid was already nervously lining himself up, lifting Langly's hips between his thighs. And Langly didn't dare say a word, until Reid began to push in, slow and steady. "All the way. _Put it in me_!"  
  
Reid buried himself in Langly's body, hot flesh soft against him, even with the pressure as Langly clenched and arched. His hips rocked, one slow, hard thrust after another, even as his mind tried to object -- this was disgusting, the test had missed something and he was going to pass it on to Langly, never mind unforeseen diseases he was going to catch the obvious one by way of his own idiocy. But he pushed that back, his attention on Langly, from the look of bliss on his face to the incredible sensation of being deep inside him, skin on skin.  
  
_Skin on skin_ , something in the back of his mind repeated, treacherously, and the scabs on his arms itched with the thought.  
  
And suddenly, Langly stopped writhing and pleading, beneath him, breathing still ragged but face completely serious.  
  
"Reid? Not looking so good..."  
  
"I'm..." Reid shook his head. "I don't think I can do this."  
  
"Did I not say I wasn't going to do anything you were going to regret tomorrow?" Langly let go of his own knee. "You should probably stop."  
  
"I'm really sorry."  
  
"I smacked you in the face. Everything since then has been an improvement."  
  
Reid finally laughed, covering his face with one hand before realising that hand still had lube on it, albeit clean lube. "Oh. Ew."  
  
"Did you just...?"  
  
"Plus one stupid decision."  
  
"Okay. New plan, probably less stupid," Langly decided, easing himself off of Reid. "We're going to go take a shower. Both of us. And we're going to finish this in the shower, where there's soap and running water."  
  
"Didn't we decide showers were an accident waiting to happen?" Reid asked, still looking a bit shaken at the series of events that had led up to him smearing lube across his face.  
  
"Only if we're standing up. Rinse off a bit, sit in my lap, and I'll make it worth your while."  
  
"You just don't give up, do you?" Reid manged a tiny smile.  
  
"I spent my entire life not giving up on ... pretty much everything that wasn't sex. I'd like to think I've worked up some applicable skills." Langly pushed himself up on his elbows again. "And you let me do it. You're into the adventure, the 'what if'. I'm not even good for three minutes, and you just ... plan around that. So, yeah, I think a little creative thinking is totally worth it. Besides, I love watching you come. You always look like you've seen god."  
  
"Well, if the local sex god counts," Reid teased, almost reaching for Langly, before realising both his hands were covered in more and less used lube.  
  
"Come on, let's get that off you." Langly rubbed his ankle against Reid's side. "And then let's get you off."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That said, I'm taking a few days off to write some non-disaster porn for another fandom, because _someone_ in the audience has been waiting months for me to get off my ass...


	15. Chapter 15

Langly leaned against the back of the bath, looking up to where Reid stood above him, still enjoying the hot water against his face. Long legs, lean body, probably more muscle than he'd ever carried, if Langly was honest with himself, but overall, a similar view from a very different angle. And that was something he'd never really expected -- to want a good, long look at someone shaped so similarly to himself. But, then he'd always thought of Kimmy as a one-off, a weird-off, not a statistically significant datapoint. Sure, there were guys that were hot, but that was more a point of intellectual curiosity than something he'd intended to do anything about. He'd always been more interested in women, like he was supposed to be, by all accounts. And he'd never really bothered to question it, because what was the point, really? He wasn't doing too much about that either.  
  
So here he was, at the far end of infinite improbability, lounging in the shower, with some hot, young fed -- for some other words he wasn't sure belonged in a description of someone willing to get naked with him -- revelling in the falling water like some kind of naiad. Except naiads were all female, he thought. But, he'd thought a lot of things, over the years, and exactly none of this was on the list. Neither was being dead, but he'd gotten used to that. This was probably a better idea. For certain values of 'better' that probably still included dying.  
  
As Reid turned around, Langly's eyes drifted up the length of his body, pausing briefly on the scabs on his forearms.  
  
"You all right? You're looking a little dazed."  
  
"That's because I am a little dazed." Langly managed a ghost of a smile. "You coming down here, or am I getting up?"  
  
"I think that depends on how dazed..."  
  
"Let's just say all the blood has left my head."  
  
Reid pointed down. "Lies."  
  
"I never said it got where it was going, I just said it left my head!" Langly folded his hands in his lap.  
  
Reid conceded the point, an impish gleam in his eyes as he lowered himself to his knees over Langly's thighs. "So, what were you thinking about, or were you just counting the scars on the back of my thighs?"  
  
"You don't have any scars on the back of your thighs."  
  
"Zero is still a number."  
  
"Screw you," Langly groaned, sporting a sharp smile that said he knew he'd been had.  
  
"That was the point of this exercise, yes." Reid laughed, wondering if he'd taken that one too far.  
  
"Then you're going to have to get a little closer, Special Agent Sexy."  
  
"You keep calling me that. I'm really pretty average, as far as looks go," Reid protested, shifting himself forward until his knees hit the back of the bath.  
  
"Average would not even have gotten me out of my desk chair." Langly slid his ass down so that when he sat up, he was a bare inch from Reid's chest. "Besides, who said I was talking about your looks? Not that you're not exactly the sort of thing I'd have walked into a door frame staring at, when I still went places I didn't have an ingrained sense of the doors in. And then denied it. Because why admit to things, when you could just not?"  
  
Reid laughed. "Admit nothing; then you can say you never said it." He nudged Langly's face up with his nose and stole a kiss.  
  
Langly's hands traced lines along Reid's back, diverting rivulets of water around his fingers. One hand traced the line of Reid's spine, fingers settling easily against the spots Reid had shown him. It was almost as if fingers were meant to go there, which was an interesting design feature, and he wondered, distantly, what that was an artefact of.  
  
Reid purred, nuzzling Langly's cheek, as he realised where this was going. "If you're going to do that, you'll have to press harder." A second later he squeaked and slammed his knee against the back of the bath. "Not that hard!"  
  
"Sorry." Langly winced, sympathetically, fingers easing off a bit.  
  
But, Reid had already stopped paying attention, rolling his hips against Langly's thighs, warm sounds of want on his lips. "A little lower..."  
  
As his fingers slid down, Langly could hear Reid's breath stutter, tiny sounds of frustrated desire against his ear. His other hand gently stroked Reid's side, palm turning to drag fingertips down the inside of Reid's thigh. He'd meant to take that hand a little further, but he felt the sudden tension in Reid's back, another splash lost in the hot water already running down their skin, pooling where it could.  
  
Reid's panting gradually slowed, a few gulping breaths preceding his ability to find words. "I don't want to be done, yet."  
  
"We don't have to be." Langly pushed Reid's wet hair back. "We're not going to run out of hot water."

* * *

"Little more than an hour," Frohike drawled, not even turning around as he finally heard voices approaching.  
  
"Screw you." Langly had a can of Jolt in one hand and the other arm around Reid's waist.  
  
"Not in a million years. If I could go the rest of my life without ever again hearing you begging for cock at the top of your lungs -- specifically you -- I'd still die with regrets that I had to hear it once." Frohike turned his chair just enough to see Reid looking weak-kneed and subtly pleased. "The fed's fine. I'm getting used to that. Adds to the ambiance."  
  
"Am I holding the plate numbers?" Langly asked, totally ignoring the entire thread.  
  
"No, sorry, when you sounded like you were going to spend the rest of the day on a gay remake of Debbie Does Dallas, I gave them to Byers, instead."  
  
"What do we have, Byers?" Langly helped Reid onto the edge of the desk and dropped into his seat.  
  
" _You_ have a package," Byers told him. "Look to your right. I have about half the plates, and there's not much interesting in here. There's some public lots, so most of it looks like suburban family of four goes to the doctor three doors down. Got a couple of cleaning companies. The more remote ones don't have parking that faces the road, so we've got nothing, there. Just the ones on the edges of civilisation."  
  
"Pass me the cleaning companies." Langly reached for the box and slid open his desk drawer for a knife. "If nothing else, maybe we can get someone talking. I'll take a look."  
  
He slit the box open and stared dumbly into it, before shoving his keyboard out of the way and batting the box down to Reid. "You're going to kill me."  
  
Reid looked confused until he saw the first thing in the top of the box: the condoms Langly had ordered. "I'm not sure 'kill' is the word I'd use. That seems a little far. Maybe 'incapacitate'."  
  
"Not 'maim'?"  
  
"Not intentionally." Reid rubbed the bridge of his nose and then went back to the papers he'd been comparing, earlier, the names coming back to him as he began looking, again.  
  
"We are not that bad," Langly protested, quietly, pulling the keyboard back toward him and looking into the cleaning companies Byers had passed over.  
  
"You can only say that because you're not the one with three fresh bruises." Reid laid down a page and picked up another. He didn't want to find a link between the two lists, which made him check that much more intently.  
  
"Two at most. Your face isn't going to bruise. Your knee, on the other hand..." Langly tipped his head to the side, eyes never leaving the screen.  
  
"If you apologise for one more thing, I'm sleeping on the couch," Reid warned.  
  
Minutes turned into more minutes, and finally Langly huffed and leaned back in his chair, raising his voice, to be heard. "Byers? None of these companies are there for the addresses we want. There's nothing here."  
  
"Next door," Reid said, suddenly, twisting around to look at the street views displayed on the monitor over the one Langly was working on. "This one's a strip mall. Depending on the construction, there may be a back hall -- and that looks like a mid-eighties building, which makes it likely. It was a popular style at the time. They may be getting paid to clean both, by a single source, but only listing the one address, since it's the same address aside from the unit letter. You'd never see them leave the building, once they went in, until they finished up and came out."  
  
"And _I'm_ the paranoid conspiracy theorist." Langly huffed and checked anyway.  
  
"Fifteen years with the FBI." Reid shrugged and stretched his bruised leg. "I might have picked up a few things along the way."  
  
Langly shook his head, when he finished going back through the data. "There's nothing that would make sense. Nothing directly next door, nothing thematically similar -- not the doctors, or the pharmacy, or even the dentist. I've got a law office, the soap mafia, and three restaurants."  
  
"The... soap... mafia?" Reid blinked down at Langly.  
  
"Door to door sales," Byers answered from across the room. "People and business practices that make Fight Club look good."  
  
"I'm still not sure about that." Frohike made an uncertain sound. "You still have a long way to go before I'll believe that Fight Club is preferable to getting my ear bit off in an Indiana hotel room."  
  
"How about we all just agree that all soap purchases should be made on the internet?" Langly argued, turning his chair around to face the other end of the room. "I don't think we're getting anything like this. I don't have a good enough idea of what I'm looking at, but it all looks pretty straightforward. We need another way in. I think we just wait to identify our source, and then see if we can't get one of the photographers to camp out for a couple of days. I want to know who this person is, before we start throwing photographers at the problem."  
  
"I'd agree." Byers nodded. "They're not us. We can't just send them charging into something that's just as likely to be a trap as anything."  
  
"And there's no room for the kind of stupid shit we used to go to jail for. I'm not getting somebody sent up for treason over some bullshit prank we might've spent a night in the drunk tank over." Langly nodded. "Besides, it's not the nineties any more. There's no excuse for getting nailed over bad research, when everything is connected to the internet."  
  
"Says the guy who just failed to find anything useful." Frohike turned around to join the conversation.  
  
"That's not bad research. That's just an inability to find what isn't there. Which is what's supposed to happen," Langly shot back. "We're coming at it the wrong way. I just don't know what the right way is, yet."  
  
"So, we find the mystery muckraker and hope that gives us a jumping off point." Frohike shook his head. "I don't like that we've spent all day on this, certain people's excursions aside, and we've got nothing to show for it."  
  
"We've never been able to find the evidence for _any of this_ ," Langly argued, folding his arms and shoving his legs out, ankles crossed. "What makes you think we're magically going to find it now? What Byers asked for was to figure out who was sending us this crap, and whether any of it was ever going to be worth a damn. I can do that, but it's going to take a little while."  
  
Byers caught Reid's eye from across the room. "Dinner?"  
  
"I'm pretty sure I wouldn't turn down food." Reid gave a lopsided smile. "The local definitions seem to be compatible with mine."  
  
"You haven't had Langly's cooking," Frohike muttered, loudly, as he sorted photos for the next issue.  
  
"There is nothing _wrong_ with my cooking." Langly looked like he might get up.  
  
"There really isn't," Byers agreed.  
  
"I might as well drink butter and jet fuel and then swallow a match," Frohike complained.  
  
"This from the guy who practically drinks Tabasco sauce," Langly shot back. "It's not my fault you can't handle my mother's classic jalapeño and pickle fritters."  
  
"I promise he makes a fantastic meatloaf," Byers said to Reid, with an apologetic shrug.  
  
"My Watergate salad is to die for." Langly slid further down in the chair, his legs stretching even further as if taking up more floor space were a dominance display. He never uncrossed his ankles.  
  
"There were two things wrong with the Watergate Hotel: one of them was Nixon, and the other one was that salad," Frohike argued. "Pineapple, pistachio, and _marshmallows_? Who the hell designed that thing?"  
  
"It's a descendant of ambrosia salad." Byers finally got up, making his way down from the desk he shared with Frohike. "Which is also good, as long as you don't make it with mayonnaise."  
  
"Lies," Langly declared, unfolding his arms to square himself in the chair. "Mayo is the one true way. It's not bad with whipped cream, but it's not _right_. You know I only make it that way because you'll eat it if I do."  
  
"You also put canned vegetables in pineapple jello," Frohike accused, following Byers down. "I'm going to start dinner, before you get any ideas."  
  
"Screw you! There is nothing wrong with my cooking! I grew up on that!" Langly yelled after him.  
  
"Your family's cookbooks were from the thirties, weren't they?" Reid asked, the insight suddenly upon him. "I bet you also put tomato soup in spice cake."  
  
Langly blinked and looked up at Reid. "I've never baked a cake. Tomato soup?"  
  
"Campbell's. It's a classic." A small smile crept across Reid's face. "It's been a very long time since I've tried to bake a cake, and I never tried to make that one, but I've eaten it. Actually, I only ever tried to make one cake, and ... ah... let's just say I'm much better at grilled cheese."  
  
"Okay, now you have to tell the story. You can't just say something like that and leave it unfinished." Langly leaned to the side, resting his arm against Reid's leg as he looked back and up.  
  
"Actually, I could!" Reid's voice jumped up an octave, discomfort clear in the pitch alone.  
  
"Twenty-something, new apartment, terrible electric mixer accident?" Langly teased.  
  
"I don't think I was even ten. It was my mother's birthday." Reid cleared his throat. "Her cakes came from the bakery, after that. I don't -- Can we talk about something else?"  
  
Langly realised he'd stepped into something a lot nastier than expected. This wasn't just some early twenties genius minus common sense mishap to be laughed about in retrospect. "Ambrosia salad. Opinions?"  
  
"I have eaten every imaginable kind of ambrosia salad, and I have to agree with Byers. Mayonnaise does not belong in jello." Reid shrugged apologetically. "Lime is better than orange. Walnuts are better than pecans. I'm still not entirely convinced any of it is actually food."  
  
"My mother is rolling over in her grave." Langly sat back up and shoved himself out of the chair. "Come on, let's get a look at what Frohike's making, before I decide if I have to rescue us from his extra spicy Salsa Vendetta. It's not bad, it just doesn't need to be something you eat by surprise. Or without a lot of avocado and eggs."  
  
"Didn't he just complain about jalapeño fritters?" Reid followed Langly down to the hall.  
  
"It's not the jalapeños that are the problem. I use pickled jalapeños instead of roasted ones, and then put like three other kinds of pickles in, before deep frying the fritters. They're not even that spicy, compared to what _he_ eats, but the combination of hot peppers, vinegar, and grease -- I put him out of commission for two whole days, last time." Langly smiled wickedly. "And if I make them, he'll still eat them, because they're _good_."  
  
"I'm still not convinced that counts as food. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I've eaten stranger things with less provocation."  
  
"Say the word and I'll lure you to the Dark Side, once again."  
  
"I think I'm going to ask Byers, first."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I RETURN. The plot thickens like a tomato aspic, only to be ignored for the immediate future, in favour of further bizarre adventures. ( ~~Four more days of mayhem, before the next fic in this series which is already partially plotted in another document...~~ )


	16. The Fourth Day

Four in the morning, according to the time on the laptop, and Langly had been up the whole day. He looked beside him at where Reid slept, face pressed against his hip, one arm wrapped around the thigh that wasn't balancing the laptop. The nightmares seemed to have passed, finally, an hour ago, Langly stroking Reid's hair and quietly talking about the time he'd hacked into one of the early LED billboards -- owned by a strip club -- and changed it to show a twenty-second loop from a roadrunner cartoon. Somewhere in the middle of the story, Reid had stopped grinding his teeth and shivering, falling back into an easy sleep without even waking.  
  
He'd heard Frohike go to bed, right around then, and there'd been no sound since the water stopped running in the bathroom. There wouldn't be anyone in the kitchen, at this hour, but that would be just as true two hours from now. He bookmarked the page he was looking at, not to lose it if anything went wrong, and reached over Reid to set the laptop on the nightstand and plug it in. The screensaver would be enough light for Reid, he thought, carefully untangling himself and sliding down under the blanket, as Reid made a disgruntled sound, in his sleep, reaching out to very firmly put his arm around Langly once again.  
  
This was good, Langly thought. Or something like good. It was probably healthy to have a reason to go to bed other than complete exhaustion, even if that reason was grabby and sometimes woke up in a panic. Pity this probably wouldn't last, _couldn't_ last. Of course, a lot of things had happened, lately, that he'd always thought had probabilities functionally indistinct from zero. He pulled Reid's leg over his hip and closed his eyes, hand finding where it fit against Reid's thigh. However long this lasted, he'd take it.  
  
Reid woke first, feeling smeary and distant from the number of consecutive hours he'd been asleep. But, this was the first time he'd woken up. It couldn't have been that long, he thought. A shifting pattern of dim light spilled over his shoulder, and the building was as quiet as it ever got. Langly was asleep in his arms, twisted into some complicated position to keep from suffocating against his chest, and he moved his arm to brush the hair back from Langly's face.  
  
"Hmm?" Langly's eyes didn't open, but he tensed a bit, stretching without moving from what had become an almost comfortable position.  
  
"Go back to sleep," Reid whispered. "I didn't mean to wake you."  
  
This time Langly managed to blink and squint up at Reid. "You're up. The kitchen is ours. Breakfast?"  
  
"I'm willing to admit the fritters might be edible, but not for breakfast," Reid hedged.  
  
"No, not the fritters. Not for breakfast. Fritters for lunch. _Cake_ for breakfast." Langly untwisted his back and leaned back, putting just enough space between them to continue the conversation. "I thought you were pulling my leg about that cake, but I found the recipe -- the original from nineteen twenty-five. I've never made a cake. You've never made a cake. Not successfully, anyway. I'm pretty sure we both like cake, because who doesn't like cake? It's decadent and stupid. Let's do it."  
  
"I have to say 'decadent and stupid' has never really been a driving factor in my decisions." Reid rubbed his thigh against Langly's hip to scratch an itch, before realising his whole leg had gone pins and needles from being propped up for so long. With a small wince, he pulled his leg back.  
  
"Well, it's about time then, don't you think?" Langly argued. "Reckless, ridiculous, and it's probably going to end in cake. We're not going to get arrested, unlike most stupid things I've done, and the worst thing that could possibly happen is we look like idiots and wind up eating leftovers."  
  
"And it's something I'll be wearing pants for, which is a notable departure from the kind of stupid ideas we usually have together." Reid sounded like he might be considering it.  
  
"This doesn't have to involve pants," Langly pointed out.  
  
"Yes, it does. Anything that involves the oven being on by its very nature must involve pants. Pants being worn, even."  
  
A pained look crossed Langly's face. "Yeah, okay, when you put it like that..."  
  
"Still..." Reid dropped onto his back, stretching and yawning, definitely an advantage to not sleeping on a couch. "Cake and coffee for breakfast. How hard can this be? We're smart. There's a recipe."

* * *

"This smells vile." Langly peered into the bowl suspiciously, prodding at the contents with a whisk.  
  
"That's okay! It's supposed to smell gross." Reid tipped back the screen of the laptop a little further and turned it so Langly could see. "It's right there in the notes on the reproduction."  
  
"So it'll stop smelling like vomit when we bake it?" Langly didn't look convinced.  
  
"That's the idea." Reid opened the fridge. "Do you even have cream cheese?"  
  
"Yeah, it's in the-- _dammit_." Langly shoved the bowl of foul-smelling batter toward Reid. "Okay, I'll handle the cream cheese, you get this stuff in the oven. I don't think we have a cake pan, but I'm pretty sure there's a casserole dish it'll fit in. Cabinet to the right of the stove. Oil's up, it's the last shelf Frohike can reach without a stepstool."  
  
"Is this because you can't handle the smell?" Reid teased, crouching to find something that looked like the right size.  
  
"No, it's because the cream cheese is powder, and if you mix it wrong it's horrible." Stepping around Reid, Langly went for the pantry on the far side of the fridge.  
  
"Check the rest of the ingredients for the frosting. If the cream cheese is powder, something else might be." Reid held up a casserole dish, turning it as he eyed the bowl. "I think this is big enough."  
  
"Then get the next size, because I don't want to wash the oven." Langly checked the laptop and pulled a few jars out of the pantry.  
  
"Yeah, I made the 'cake rises' mistake the last time. Among other things." Reid cleared his throat and reached for the next pan anyway.  
  
"No common sense, just like the rest of us." Langly chuffed in amusement, already measuring powders, as Reid greased the pan. "When you put that in, turn on the fan. It'll probably wake Frohike, but I just don't want to smell it."  
  
"It's not going to be that bad. By the time you can smell it, it should already smell like a spice cake," Reid argued, wanting to at least get the cake out of the oven before he had to deal with Langly and Frohike sniping at each other over food.  
  
"If I throw up, it's gonna be on you." Langly pointed with a measuring spoon.  
  
"I'm willing to accept that possibility, because it's unspeakably remote." Grabbing a fork, Reid scraped the bowl into the pan. He turned to put the bowl in the sink, but Langly was filling a measuring cup, muttering numbers to himself.  
  
Stepping back from the sink, Langly almost bumped into Reid, and his entire body changed direction around his hands, still holding the cup of water. "Dishwasher," he pointed out, spotting the bowl.  
  
"Rinsing it first. I'm not putting that in a closed space that's going to probably be re-opened before you run it, if it smells like this."  
  
Langly set down the water and took Reid's face in his hands, giving him a long look and then a quick kiss. "I love it when you're paying more attention than I am. You're like Byers, except hot."  
  
"Didn't you tell me you almost hit on Byers? I'm not sure 'except hot' is quite the distinction you were looking for," Reid teased, washing out the bowl.  
  
"Okay, fine, Byers is hot, but the amount of drunk I have to be for that to happen makes it a non-issue." Langly looked up from where he was blending water into a bowl of powders. "You're hot all the time. Or at least you're hot when I'm sober. I haven't gotten drunk near you, yet. Maybe that's it. Maybe you'd be less hot, if I was drunk enough to think Byers was hot. Or you'd be even hotter, and I'd just implode."  
  
"I think I prefer it when you _ex_ plode."  
  
Langly blinked, blinked again, opened his mouth and closed it. "You just _wait_ , don't you?"  
  
Reid smiled like the cat that ate the canary. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he said, opening the oven and turning to slide the cake into it.  
  
"Like hell you don't." The glop in the bowl that Langly was stirring began to look a bit more like the right consistency, as he continued to whisk it. "Okay, this goes in the fridge, and then we've got... forty-five minutes?"  
  
"Forty if we want to be extra sure we don't burn it. It's somewhere between forty and fifty minutes, depending on the oven and the altitude." Reid tidied things off the counter, loading the dishwasher.  
  
"You want to spend that licking frosting off my fingers?"  
  
"If we do that, we're not going to have enough for the cake."  
  
"Double batch." Langly swiped a finger through the frosting and held it out to Reid. "I don't think it's set, yet, but it's still good."  
  
"Put it in the fridge," Reid decided, after a moment's uncomfortable staring. "I haven't had enough coffee to be making decisions like this. And I _might_ lick it off you -- _maybe_ \-- but not your hands."  
  
Langly stuck his dripping finger in his own mouth, as he remembered that first dinner -- second, technically -- and Reid's reaction to being offered that bit of bread and stew. He'd thought it might be the obsessive cleanliness -- he _had_ walked through a sewer to get there -- but he was starting to get the sense something else was going on. And he was smart enough not to ask, this time. "Your loss. But, yeah, it'll probably be better once it sets."  
  
"And I'll probably be better after the third cup."

* * *

Byers came into the kitchen, bundled in a massive robe, bleary-eyed and yawning. "What smells good?"  
  
"Cake." Langly pulled the serving dish into the corner of the table, between his elbow and Reid's, leaving the coffee pot on a trivet where it stood.  
  
"Mystery cake. It's good." Reid reached out and poured himself more coffee. "I'm still surprised you had raisins."  
  
"Those were _my_ raisins, Langly. And I'm taking a slice of that cake, because you owe me." Byers got a cup and a plate and sat down across from Reid, pouring himself a cup of coffee before the rest of the pot could disappear.  
  
Langly huffed and shoved the cake toward Byers, who eyed it critically.  
  
"What did you bake this in? It doesn't look like any of our pans."  
  
"First of all, there's three slices missing from it," Langly pointed out.  
  
"Three?" Byers eyed him sideways.  
  
"This is my second."  
  
Reid cleared his throat and took a bite of cake, eyes never leaving his plate. "We made it in the lasagne pan and then cut it in half to make layers."  
  
Byers caught on, as he wrested the knife from Langly and cut himself a slice. "We don't have two pans the same size, do we?"  
  
"No, we don't. Because who the hell makes cake around here?" An enormous bite of cake vanished into Langly's mouth.  
  
Byers sipped his coffee, eyeing the cake uncertainly. Reid was eating it, which probably meant it was safe. It definitely smelled good. It looked like cakes were supposed to... "What kind of frosting?"  
  
"Cream cheese." Langly pointed at Byers with his fork, as he chewed. "And stay the hell out of what's in the fridge. That's for him, not for you. And it's definitely not for you to do what he's planning to do with it."  
  
Reid cleared his throat again, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. "You're the one with the plan for the frosting. That was not my idea, even if I might be convinced to go along with it."  
  
"If I put pineapple in it--" Langly started, and Reid's eyes leapt up to his immediately.  
  
"Absolutely not."  
  
"I'm glad someone here still has sense," Byers remarked quietly, examining the bite of cake on the end of his fork.  
  
"Great, I'm getting tag-teamed by fed and ex-fed," Langly huffed, cutting himself a third slice of cake.  
  
Reid waited until Langly looked up from the cake, then let his eyebrows move subtly upward.  
  
"Wha-- _AUGH_. I'm not drunk enough for that. I don't think there is a drunk enough for that," Langly complained, flicking frosting at Reid.  
  
Byers looked at Reid, opened his mouth, and put cake in it. There was a time and a place for asking questions, and this was not it. If he didn't ask, just maybe no one would feel the need to explain. The cake was good, though. A nice raisin spice cake that went perfectly with the coffee. He'd have to ask for the recipe, later. He'd have to ask _Reid_ for the recipe, later.  
  
"You two up to anything, today, that's not going to require a closed door and earplugs for the rest of us?"

Reid didn't answer, preoccupied with wiping the frosting off his shirt.  
  
"I don't know. I didn't really get past 'Frohike's sleeping, bake a cake'," Langly admitted, glancing up at the clock high on the wall over where Byers sat. "Might do a little work, if the parts come in, today. You should probably check out the complaint from lot twenty-seven. It's a people thing, or I'd be all over it."  
  
"Twenty-seven? Again?" Byers's brow furrowed, and he finished chewing before he spoke again. "Do we have anything that supports what they're saying?"  
  
"I checked the video for everything near them." Langly shrugged, put more cake in his mouth, and kept talking anyway. "It's a stray dog. There's nothing else there. Tell them to raise the height on the motion detectors."  
  
"Didn't Gathani set those up for us?" Byers asked.  
  
"Yeah, but I think twenty-seven keeps angling them back down. If I wasn't so sure it was a dog, I'd ask what the hell cryptid they're afraid of breaking into the place."  
  
The pieces came together in Reid's head. "You don't just own this building. You own the whole--"  
  
Langly nodded. "We're not just laundering government money. At least one of the corporations we're doing business as _has_ a real business. It gives us better access control and a solid awareness of what's going on around us. There's a reason we're in the middle, and not out on some edge, like you'd expect us to be. Most of the eyes here are ours, and I know where all the others are. Lets us provide basic surveillance and security as part of the package, too, which adjusts the type of tenants we get. Larger corporations prefer to handle their own security. It keeps us out of contact with the people with an army of lawyers and a taste for trouble."  
  
"It also provides a moderate and completely explicable income," Byers added. "Unfortunately, that means I have to play landlord, sometimes. Gathani and Muringa handle most of the day to day things that make it past the receptionist. They're _really_ good with the hardware and the security network, and I have no doubt someone's eventually going to hire them away from us."  
  
"Not with what we pay them." Langly smiled grimly. "I pay those sisters what they're worth, which is more than they're going to get anywhere else. You know who might be able to take them from us? Kimmy. And he's too cheap. You pay somebody what they're worth and it's a lot harder for anyone else to bribe them."  
  
"But, yeah. We own all of this, as far as the walls. And you could hit those walls with a tank." Byers shrugged. "We wanted to make sure they'd be mostly accident proof."  
  
"Twenty-seven's going to be a problem. How much longer is that lease?" Langly groaned and pushed his glasses up to rub his eyes with both hands.  
  
"Four more months, I think," Byers said, returning his attention to the cake. "Decline to renew?"  
  
"Run it past Frohike, but yeah. We don't need someone complaining about industrial espionage every time a raccoon jumps into a dumpster." More cake went into Langly's mouth. "I've been over the video. The timestamps match, and there's nothing that looks like somebody else has been fucking with it. They've dropped the angle on the sensors again."  
  
"Twenty-seven, again?" Frohike's voice preceded him into the kitchen. "Can't we just throw them out? They're in violation of the lease, if they're screwing with the sensors."  
  
"That would probably go to court," Byers pointed out. "If we just decline to renew the lease, there's not a lot they can do."  
  
"Where'd you get a cake at this hour?" Frohike asked, eyeing the cake remains as he reached for the coffee pot that wasn't where he expected it to be. "And where the hell is the coffee?"  
  
"It's over here." Byers pointed.  
  
"We baked a cake," Reid volunteered. "I can promise it doesn't have any jalapeños in it. Or pickles, for that matter."  
  
"I don't know if we baked enough for _four_ people." Langly leaned back in his chair as Reid finally took a second slice.  
  
"I don't know if I'd eat something _you_ baked." Frohike took a few slices of bread from the breadbox and a can of salmon from the cupboard, before he opened the fridge, looking for something else, and picked up the bowl of frosting. "Did one of you make cream cheese? What did I say about covering the cream ch--"  
  
"Put it down!" Langly shouted across the kitchen. "That's not what you think it is! That is mine! Mix your own damn cream cheese!"  
  
"He stuck his fingers in it, before he put it back in the fridge," Reid pointed out, covering his mouth not to drop crumbs.  
  
The sound of the frosting sliding back over the shelf of the fridge could be heard in the silence that stretched across the kitchen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, actually, [that cake is a real thing](https://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/494071_1930.html). Yes, I've had it. No, I haven't made it. But, I do suggest spicing it a little more heavily than the recipe calls for, because that's ... not going to be recognisable as a spice cake at those proportions.


	17. Chapter 17

The cake was gone, before Byers retreated to his desk to call Gathani and then the idiot in twenty-seven to make arrangements to have the sensors adjusted again. Even Frohike had finally gotten a slice, after Langly realised half the cake was all that would fit in his stomach. Langly sacrificed what remained of the cake, in favour of claiming the rest of the frosting and retreating to the back.  
  
A scalding shower later, Langly sprawled across the bed, draped in a bathrobe and checking the shipping information on another package. That one would take longer, he knew. Specialised parts, only one manufacturer in the world for that particular fabric. He sighed and scooped more frosting onto his fingers from the bowl that sat between him and Reid. "Seriously, not my fingers?"  
  
"Other people's fingers don't belong in my mouth." The words were cool and measured.  
  
Langly decided to test the hypothesis he'd discarded, earlier. "I just washed my entire body. There's been nothing on my hands that hasn't been in your mouth, before -- the frosting, my tongue..."  
  
"It's not that simple." Reid rolled onto his side, shifting away, but facing Langly.  
  
Langly said nothing, sticking the frosting-covered fingers into his mouth, instead. Yes, he was waiting, but he had a mouthful. He couldn't really be called upon to speak while his tongue was otherwise occupied.  
  
"Have you ever been tied to a chair?" Reid asked, finally, and Langly's stomach dropped, a chill following it down.  
  
"Yeah, of course I've been tied to a chair. Come on, who hasn't been tied to a chair?" Langly aimed for humour, but it fell flat.  
  
"There's a few things you can't do, tied to a chair," Reid pointed out. "If you're lucky, someone else will do them for you. For certain definitions of 'luck'."  
  
Langly swallowed hard. and picked up the bowl of frosting in one hand, pushing himself back onto his knees with the other. "I'm just going to put this back in the fridge."  
  
Reid reached out and just barely managed to get his fingers into the frosting. "Come back here with that. I'm not done rotting my teeth out." As he licked frosting from his own fingers, Langly nearly dropped the bowl. "Just keep your hands away from my mouth and we're fine."  
  
"We're running out of obvious body parts to lick it off," Langly pointed out, settling back on his heels and holding the bowl out to Reid.  
  
"I never said you couldn't lick it off of my fingers." Reid stopped and thought about that. "And that's probably the only part of me you're getting frosting on."  
  
Langly tipped his head to the side and studied Reid, for a long moment. "I can live with that."  
  
Minutes later found them tangled together, Reid's sticky fingers clutching at Langly's hair, the slowly melting frosting shoved aside, for the moment. Kisses followed kisses until the taste of sweet vanilla turned sour.  
  
"You know where would probably work really well?" Reid stretched for the frosting. "Right along your spine."  
  
Langly blinked a few times. "What?"  
  
"I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say: 'No, no, this is a horrible idea.' And that's probably true. At the very least, it's going to need another shower to get it all off." Looking down at Langly, Reid offered half a smile, faint and almost apologetic. "I still think I'm right. Are you in?"  
  
Langly looked Reid up and down, eyeing him like he was crazy. "Get off me. I'm wearing way too much for this to work." He nudged Reid and started trying to extract himself from the bathrobe, scoffing. _"Am I in_?"  
  
Reid's smile widened as he backed off, taking the bowl with him, licking frosting off his fingertips as Langly removed the total of one article of clothing he was wearing and tied his hair out of the way. He looked on in confusion as Langly pulled the laptop over.  
  
Langly caught the look. "You get to try something new; I get to try something new."  
  
"I don't follow."  
  
"Okay, so, there's this story that goes around, and the names change, and the project changes, but there's always a story about the amazing hack somebody pulled while getting a blowjob." One shoulder lifted in half a shrug. "You're not into blowjobs. I'm not into blowjobs. New story time: the amazing hack I pulled while a gorgeous fed licked frosting off me, location unspecified."  
  
Reid laughed at the utter ridiculousness, until the implications sank in. "I don't know if I'm ready to go down in urban legendry for this."  
  
"If it makes you feel better, I wasn't going to put your name on it. Figured I'd loose it into the ether attributed to a dead man and an unknown fed. Anyone in the know would probably assume Scully, after that trip to Vegas." Langly paused. "Not that I would ever intentionally sully her name by implying her tongue came into contact with any part of my body under any circumstances."  
  
"Mulder."  
  
"I would _never_." Langly's eyes widened in stark disbelief at the suggestion. "He's got brains, but he's not my kind of crazy. And I could go my entire life without sitting through another memory of him tearing his clothes off and writhing on the floor. That was the opposite of hot. That's how we met, and it definitely ruined the idea right out of the box. The box I would like to put that back into. No."  
  
"If people would guess Scully, they'd guess Mulder," Reid pointed out, kneeling across Langly's hips with the bowl of frosting in hand.  
  
"Of the two of them, I might let them have Mulder. He'd think it was just as hilariously gross as I do." Langly switched to the second desktop and cracked his knuckles.  
  
"You should do it. I want to see how long it takes before I hear it from Garcia," Reid decided, daubing Langly's back with frosting. "Before she decides I need to know about your wild affairs with other federal agents, before me."  
  
"I feel like I should reiterate that while there have been other feds in my life, I have never had a wild affair with any of them, except you." As the last word left Langly's mouth, Reid's lips settled between his shoulderblades, followed by  long stroke of tongue and the feeling of frosting smearing.  
  
Langly decided to check Alcea's mail, again, hoping for a shipment notification. Start with something simple, he thought, as Reid's mouth moved across his skin, leaving only a faint stickiness where the frosting had been. This could work, he decided, as the mailbox yielded nothing of interest. The tiny point of contact against his back was of great interest. Just enough to be fun, not enough to be horrible.  
  
Reid worked his way down, keeping only one point of contact at a time -- frosting-loaded fingers or tongue, but not both. "I think the vanilla works on you," he offered, as he raised his lips from the point at which Langly's spine gave way to hips. He'd give it a moment, and then maybe paint the stripe back up, if his tongue didn't decide it had tasted more than enough sugar for one day.  
  
"I still think lemon would've been better on you, but lemon cream cheese frosting is a completely edible thing, if we ever want to find out." Langly's hands flew across the keyboard, generating nearly incomprehensible lines, as he built something just for this occasion.  
  
"I'm still not sure how many places I'd let you put frosting on me. Fingers are one thing. I can see them, they're easy to wash... More than that, and I think it would just get too sticky to really be enjoyable." After a few breaths through his mouth, Reid decided he could probably handle the path back up, but that would be the end of it. The frosting was much too sweet to eat that much of it straight, and he'd already been eating it long before they got to this point. He dipped his fingers back into the frosting and began to trace the line back up, a little less thick, this time.  
  
Langly was shivering by the time Reid's lips pressed against the skin between his shoulders again, and a terrible plan took shape behind his eyes. His hand darted under the pillows beside where they lay and he bounced a condom off Reid's forehead, without looking.  
  
"You're not serious." Reid looked down at the plastic wrapper dead in the middle of the line of spit and sugar down Langly's back.  
  
"Betelgeuse, not Sirius." Langly didn't look away from the screen, the vibrations in his upper arms absorbed by the bed against his elbows before they could reach his hands. "Serious as a head wound, if you're up for it. I'm going to do something legendarily stupid that I absolutely cannot tell you anything about. Well, I mean, it's not stupider than anything else I've admitted to, but the man who did those things is dead."  
  
"Is it going to have national security implications?" Reid asked, cutting straight to the root concern.  
  
This time, Langly looked over his shoulder, to make sure Reid could see his face."The fact that I _can_ do it is a national security problem. But, no. I'm not going to damage anything. I'm not going to steal anything. I'm not even going to touch anyone's open cases or mess with anything that would affect them. Just a little fun. Somebody else will get a laugh out of it five or ten years from now."  
  
"And you think you can do this, without getting caught, while having sex?" Reid looked entirely unconvinced. "I feel like I should be offended by this, but I'm much more concerned about the future of my career, if you're wrong."  
  
"I'm not going to get caught. I've never gotten caught, and I'm not going to start now." Almost caught, sure, but almost only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades, both of which being things Langly hoped to go the rest of his life without encountering again.  
  
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you've also never tried to do something like this while having sex," Reid pointed out.  
  
"No, but I've done something similar and a lot more dangerous straight out of bed, before my first cup of coffee, with one eye crusted shut. I think that counts as far as setting precedent." Langly wrapped an arm of his glasses into his tied-back hair.  
  
Reid leaned back to set the frosting on the nightstand, before fetching the lube from the drawer. "This is a horrible idea."  
  
"Then don't do it." Langly twisted around far enough to catch Reid's eye. "I'm pretty sure I can do this, but if you're not comfortable with it, there's a hundred other things we could be doing and none of them involve putting pants on."  
  
Reid swallowed and stared at his hands. "No. You want this, we're doing it. Because you've been frighteningly honest with me, so far, and I trust you with _yourself_. If you've managed not to be found for as long as you have, doing the kinds of things you've been doing, I trust you not to put yourself in the kind of danger that would get me fired."  
  
"My ass is very valuable to me, thanks."  
  
"Which is why I'm so impressed you'll share it with me."  
  
"Are we doing this?"  
  
"Prepare to become a legend." Reid leaned down to chase the last of the still-shimmering trail of sugar back down Langly's spine. The mood in the room had shifted, and he needed it to change back. He needed to let go of the chill curled in his stomach, and he reminded himself, once again, that he really didn't know anything about Langly's work -- he understood the end result, just fine, but the process was sort of a blur that his mind generally skipped over. But, he knew that Garcia was genuinely amazing at her job, and Langly had once been _better_. He reminded himself of the absent ease with which Langly had extracted information even Garcia wouldn't try for, during the Vanity case.   
  
As he reached the bottom of Langly's spine, again, Reid had started to feel better about the idea. Langly wasn't going to screw this up. It was supposed to be a thrill, not something actually dangerous. And how many times had that ever worked as planned, he asked himself, and promptly pushed the thought back out of his mind. Things not working as planned more often involved him being dressed, at least when they started, with other people who remained dressed throughout. There were exceptions, Narcisse among them, but not a significant number. No, this time, things would work as intended. This would be enjoyable.  
  
Langly was so far down, he'd almost stepped out of himself. Reid's fingers had been a mindblowing distraction, but one that was happening more next to him than to him. His body wanted, but his mind focused. Reid's _dick_ , on the other hand, was like being struck by lightning, and Langly's vision flickered, his fingers nearly committing a critical typo, before he regained control of them by letting go of his mouth. Frohike would forgive him. The story alone was worth every ill-conceived thing he might say in the making of it. This would be a _legend_.  
  
At first, his mouth sided with his body, and amid incoherent sounds of pleasure were littered the usual demands for more and harder -- and he finished hard and fast, hips canted up as he spurted into the blanket, hands still following the focus of his mind, eyes fixed on the screen aside from a few sharp flickers of consciousness. But, he wanted more, and his mouth made clear all the ways in which that should happen, but as the orgasmic rush faded, the usual swearing at the opposing system and its presumed admin began.  
  
It took Reid a moment to figure out what the hell Langly was talking about, and just as it dawned on him that he wasn't the target of the last string of mostly incomprehensible words, the focus shifted again, and Langly was back to demanding harder and faster, which Reid was more than happy to provide, right up to the point it seemed like the recoil from the mattress might be getting dangerous. But, however dangerous or ridiculous the situation might be, it felt _good_. Just not... good enough. Something just wasn't there, wasn't right.  
  
By the time Langly slapped the laptop shut and batted it aside, Reid was still going, more from determination and annoyance than anything. This wasn't the problem he'd expected to have. Too nervous to get this far? It would've been unpleasant, but he wouldn't have been surprised. The inexplicable shift that replaced orgasm with visceral revulsion at the idea of touching anything? A horror, but one he was familiar with. This was a whole new kind of unpleasant.  
  
"I am still the best, and now I am even better. I am a god. I am a legend," Langly declared, the words broken up by the breaths Reid's thrusts knocked out of him.  
  
"Any chance you can be legendary in a different position?" Reid asked, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice. "I don't think this is going to work."  
  
Langly hummed and stretched. "Tell me where you want me."  
  
"I feel like maybe we should stop for a bit, and then try again? Something's just not... working."  
  
"Too much frosting," Langly joked, trying to prepare himself for the sudden emptiness. It never worked, but he always tried. "And something else is definitely working."  
  
"See? You thought it. I thought it. Not the problem I'm having." Reid dropped the condom into the bin beside the bed, finally moved from the bathroom because one of them had a flash of common sense. He stayed sitting by the edge of the bed, taking up less space than even he usually did, annoyance with himself pounding in his veins, stomach churning.  
  
Langly rolled over and turned the right way on the bed, head on a pillow, looking up at Reid. "C'mere." He untangled his glasses from his hair, which had been keeping them on his face, through all that,  and tossed them toward the table at the bottom of the bed.  
  
Reid looked like he wasn't sure that was a good idea. Really, he wasn't sure anything was a good idea. Where was this coming from?  
  
"You look like a virgin on prom night, and it's not a good look on you." Langly found his bathrobe with one foot and kicked it up to his hand, so he could drape it over himself, tucked under one arm. "What's wrong?"  
  
Reid looked down at himself, the sharp response in his throat already clear on his face, until he laughed. "Not what I would have called it, but you're right. And I don't know what's wrong. I just don't want to be in my skin right now."  
  
"Pants?"  
  
Reid considered the option. "Worse."  
  
"Shower?"  
  
"Wrong problem." Reid shook his head.  
  
"A beer?"  
  
That one made Reid pause -- his entire body frozen, mid-breath. "Maybe."  
  
"It's the frosting," Langly assured him. "Watch: pickles, tomato sauce, orange juice, salsa."  
  
"All of them, except orange juice, sound good." Reid sighed and finally stretched out next to Langly. "I know better than to eat that much cream cheese in a day. That's still not _the_ problem, but it's definitely _a_ problem."  
  
"In a day. Try 'in two hours'." Langly reached out and ran his fingers down Reid's arm. "So, that's one answer, but not the one you're looking for."  
  
"That's my stomach, not my skin." Reid glanced at the fingers on his arm and moved closer to Langly, putting an arm around him.  
  
Langly closed the gap, only cloth between them, as he draped an arm and a leg over Reid's side.  
  
"Better," Reid decided, as the warmth soaked into his skin. He tipped his head down, trying to breathe in the minimal space between them, and then gave up and kissed Langly, instead. This was good. Didn't make any sense, but it was. The sensible answer to this predicament would have probably been to go sit naked in an empty bath with a book, if he'd managed to think that far beyond the discomfort, but... this seemed to be working, even if it shouldn't be. Even if he should, knowing himself, be even more disgusted by-- but that was it. He wasn't disgusted. The sensation felt like disgust against the inside of his skin, but none of the rest of it was. It was desire, frustration, annoyance. It was _not enough_ , not too much.  
  
"Touch me," he breathed into Langly's mouth, unsure how much more contact was possible between two bodies in this position, but wanting more, all the same.  
  
Langly squeezed the arm he was laying on between them, wrapping his hand around Reid's aching flesh. A firm grip, a few rough strokes of thumb.  
  
"I probably had to wash this bathrobe anyway," Langly teased, as Reid panted, witless, against his cheek.  
  
Eventually, Reid found his voice and managed to get words in the order in which he wanted them. "This week is going to be the cleanest your laundry has ever been."  
  
"Feeling better?"  
  
"Next problem: Pickles. Definitely pickles."


	18. Chapter 18

When Langly walked into the kitchen, wearing the damp-spotted bathrobe, and opened the fridge, Frohike's voice greeted him, but without the rest of Frohike. "What the genuine, freshly flaming _hell_ was that?"  
  
"Was what?" Langly avoided the question, putting the frosting back and shoving jars around until he found the massive jar of garlic dill pickles in the back of a shelf.  
  
"One minute you're doing things I don't want to think about, and the next you're yelling at the DoD admin team?"  
  
"Both of those things. At the same time." Langly sliced a few pickles and dropped them into a bowl. "Because I am the best of the best, and it will never again be in question. You are my witness."  
  
"I'd rather not be. What did you do?" A small burst of static as Frohike realised his mistake. "The hack, not the rest of it."  
  
"All I'll say about the rest of it is 'stay out of my frosting'." A splash of brine and several garlic cloves joined the pickles. "But, I slipped a filthy ASCII-art animation into a mission report from about five years ago. Just a little memento. Then I backdated the hell out of it."  
  
"... _While_?" Frohike sounded horrified. "At the _same time_?"  
  
"The best of the best," Langly repeated, heaving the pickle jar back into the fridge.  
  
"Please don't ever tell me what the pickles were for."  
  
"I'll leave that to your imagination," Langly decided, heading back into the depths of the building.

* * *

By the time anyone was willing to consider lunch, Reid was sitting at the end of the kitchen table, hunched over another bowl of pickles, with a bottle of Heineken at his elbow and a bucket with a splash of bleach by his feet. Langly chopped pickled vegetables at the kitchen island, sweeping fistfuls of minced green into the bowl of batter beside the cutting board.  
  
"Fritters?" Byers asked, as he came down from the front.  
  
"Fritters. Special Agent Sex Machine didn't tell me he's not supposed to be eating that much dairy in one day. Now, we're on to the pickles and beer part of the adventure." Langly rolled his eyes.  
  
"Hey, as a member of a sentient species, it is my fundamental right to eat things that might make me throw up," Reid argued, tossing another clove of pickled garlic into his mouth.  
  
"My god, there's two of you," Byers groaned, swiping a section of the pickled tomato Langly was dicing.  
  
"Hey, I don't do it on _purpose_!" Langly gestured at Byers with the knife. "And stay out of the tomatoes! You can have fritters when they're done, but now the balance is going to be weird."  
  
"The tomatoes are never the same size anyway." Byers looked to Reid for some backup.  
  
Reid misinterpreted the look, possibly intentionally. "What can I say? I like cheese. It just doesn't like me."  
  
"How's twenty-seven?" Langly asked, scraping the last of the tomatoes into the bowl.  
  
"Gathani agrees. She'll be glad to be rid of them, but she'll go out one more time, tonight, and deliver a warning that this is the last time she'll be fixing the sensors, and any complaints they have that turn out to be wildlife are going to be ignored, from here on out."  
  
"Good. The sooner they leave, the better." Langly smacked a pan onto the stove and turned on the burner. "There shouldn't be anything more illegal than us, here, and there's something wrong with them."  
  
"Speaking of obviously illegal," Byers started, pulling a beer out of the back of the top shelf of the fridge, where Langly always tried to hide them, "you want to tell me what I almost treated Gathani to? I disconnected right before you started yelling your head off, and at least part of that sounded like--"  
  
"You want to not say it in front of the fed?" Langly asked, scooping shortening into the hot pan with a spatula.  
  
Byers looked at Reid and then stared at Langly. "You didn't _tell him_?"  
  
"Plausible deniability." Reid tipped his beer at Byers and then took a swig. "I have no idea what he was doing, besides things I will spare you. I was absolutely not looking at the screen for any of that. I had other things on my mind, which I'm pretty sure you also heard, and I almost want to apologise for that, but at this point, you have to be expecting it." He paused. "I'll have a home to go back to, soon."  
  
"Your neighbours aren't exactly impressed with us, right now, either," Langly reminded him.  
  
"Left neighbour can spin for a free coping skill. If I have to wake up to the wall vibrating from bad dance music, they can get earplugs." Reid tried very hard not to think of exactly what the neighbour had probably heard. There was still that lingering distaste for his sex life becoming public information, regardless of what happened, here. He'd come to consider this a liminal space, mostly outside the flow of time and space in the rest of the world. It was probably the first actual vacation he'd had in... ever. What happened here would stay here, out of necessity.  
  
"Left neighbour's the new one, right?" Byers asked, leaning on the table side of the kitchen island.  
  
"Why do you know that?"  
  
Byers gave Reid a long look, one eyebrow staying in place as the rest of his face tipped down. "When Langly decided he was going to visit, I did what any reasonable person would do and checked out the blueprints and every other person living in that building. Left's only been there a few months. Lucky for you, the two of them don't seem to last anywhere very long."  
  
"I feel like I should protest this, on principle, but I know exactly what you were thinking, and I can't really suggest anything more effective."  
  
"And I'm going back with you." The sentence was punctuated with a sizzle as Langly flipped a fritter. "I want to be absolutely sure the place hasn't been wired -- 'for your safety', of course, because that's how that works. You get shot at in your house, and people get 'concerned'." The quotes around the words were audible. "More like Mafia Fed Dad might not have been the only one of the people I walked past who recognised this face. You don't need that shit. I don't need that shit, but you _really_ don't need that shit."  
  
"Thank you."  
  
"Hey, my ass is very valuable to me, and you've gotten very close to it, which is probably the safest place to be, at this point."  
  
"Not while you're cooking."  
  
Byers snorted, trying to pretend he wasn't laughing. "Can we keep him?"  
  
"No, Byers, I have to give him back." Langly tried to wipe a grease spatter off his glasses, but only made it worse. "Get your own."  
  
"I did," Byers reminded him. "I had to give her back."  
  
"You did not have to. You could've gone, and you didn't."  
  
"I had to choose between her and the two of you, and you two had a much shorter trail of dead bodies behind you! Besides, the work we were doing was important. The work she gave us..." Byers took a long swallow of beer and looked at the bottle in his hand. "I wonder where she is, sometimes. If she's still alive. If she ever thinks of us."  
  
"You saved her life," Reid cut in. "If she's alive, I don't think she could forget that."  
  
"She asked you to run away with her," Langly pointed out. "You're the one that got away. I'm sure she's still agonising, somewhere, with her new shitty husband and her three-martini lunches. You know she probably got married, because that's what she's like. And you know she's pretending he's you, because that's also what she's like. I mean, assuming she's alive."  
  
"You see? And I don't want to do that to someone! That's why I'm not even trying!"  
  
"Byers." Langly actually looked over his shoulder. "You're _dead_. _That's_ why you're not trying."  
  
"Doesn't seem to have stopped you!"  
  
"Hey, it's not my fault old friends dig up my grave just to drop hot feds in my lap!"  
  
"I can assure you that was not the purpose of that venture. I came here for work, in a strictly official capacity," Reid protested, shooting a sharp look at Langly's back.  
  
"And then you were overcome by my dashing good looks?" Langly poured the next batch of fritters, with a glance at the growing pile in the bowl on his other side.  
  
"I don't know what came over me. I was feeling a little reckless. I'm not known for my good decisions in situations like that, albeit not usually that flavour of not-so-good decisions, but I can't say I have any complaints about how this has turned out." Reid paused, blinked. "Aside from waking up naked with a gun in my face. I feel like that was somehow inevitable, though. The most recent end of an irrational progression of work-related traumatic events."  
  
"Why do you like your job, again?" Langly scoffed, still trying to get the grease off his glasses.  
  
"Please. Like you didn't fall off a roof, fall off a boat, get shot, almost get taken out by space lasers, wind up with your arm up a cow's ass, and still keep chasing the next story," Byers reminded him.  
  
"I probably would have quit after the cow." Frohike appeared in the doorway. "Or maybe after swallowing gasoline."  
  
"And yet, you didn't quit after the space lasers, or after any of those times we had you on wires when shit went south." Langly flipped more fritters out of the pan and started pouring again.  
  
"And I also didn't quit after any of the times you threw up on me. I was starting to think it was a sign of affection."  
  
Reid turned in his chair and tipped his beer at Frohike. "Well, either you're wrong or he doesn't like me, and I'm fine with whichever of those continues to involve me not getting vomited on."  
  
"He doesn't appreciate your finer qualities," Frohike teased, noticing the two open beers in the room and making his way to the fridge to grab one for himself. "Which doesn't include your taste in beer, because that's horrible."  
  
"And yet? You're still drinking my beer."  
  
"So's Byers."  
  
Byers cleared his throat, looking down at the beer in his hand and back up at Frohike. "So, what were you working on?"  
  
"Porn." Frohike shrugged.  
  
" _What?_ " Reid's eyes widened.  
  
"He runs a vintage porn blog," Langly filled in. "Quality scans of things that would otherwise be lost to the mists of time and garbage fires."  
  
"It's my magnum opus, my gift to the world. I deal almost exclusively in publications that tanked, because they're less likely to have anyone chasing down copyright claims, and they're also in greater danger of disappearing for good -- small print runs, low circulation. But, there's a lot of great work, in there. You can watch people's careers start." Frohike took a seat on the far side of the table, next to where he expected Byers to eventually sit. "Got some classic eighties leather bear magazines, this morning. They're not my thing, but they deserve the same archival effort as any emissary from the Swedish Ministry of Tits."  
  
"We live in an age where the documentation of our own culture, and those that came before us, is not just increasingly possible, but increasingly possible to make accessible, and on some level I have to respect that, appreciate it, even." Reid looked up as Langly approached the table with an assortment of condiments clutched in one arm.  
  
"Ketchup, mustard, Salsa Vendetta, nacho cheese," Langly named each one as he set it down, and then picked up the nacho cheese and moved it to Frohike's other side.  
  
"What is your boyfriend too good for the nacho cheese, or is the nacho cheese too good for your boyfriend?" Frohike asked, having missed the bucket at Reid's feet.  
  
"Agent Reid doesn't get to eat any more cheese, today." Langly went back across the kitchen to get the bowl of fritters, paper towels between each grease-soaked layer.  
  
"Agent Reid is going to be trying not to look at cheese for the next week," Reid admitted, followed by a sip of beer, because that was all that was left in the bottle.  
  
Langly detoured to the fridge and came back with two bottles, one for himself and another for Reid. "Trust me," he said, setting everything on the table, "you want a beer with this. Especially if you go with the Salsa Vendetta."  
  
"What, exactly, is Salsa Vendetta?" Reid finally asked, having heard it mentioned the night before, as well.  
  
"Frohike's salsa is not for the weak of heart," Byers explained, bringing the dishes and cutlery Langly had forgotten. "Or the weak of stomach."  
  
"It's got seven kinds of chilli peppers, two kinds of onions, yellow bell peppers, three kinds of heirloom tomato, and just a hint of cilantro." Frohike got up to get the roll of paper towels. "It's the Platonic ideal of salsa."  
  
"It'll take the roof of your mouth off, straight up into your eyeballs," Langly clarified, piling fritters and mustard onto his plate. "It's great for sinus infections."  
  
Reid watched Byers go for the nacho cheese and Frohike for the salsa, before he picked mustard, figuring it was Langly's cooking, and should at least be tried with Langly's choice of condiments. The flavour brought back memories of other things, none of them quite complete. One thought rose to the surface "I bet these would be even better with a mashed potato base. Like croquettes."  
  
"Ooooh." Byers pointed at Reid with his fork. "I think he's got the right idea."  
  
"Potatoes?" Langly looked scandalised.  
  
"You can't go wrong with potatoes," Reid reasoned. "And it would bring out the jalapeños a little better."  
  
"You can absolutely go wrong with potatoes," Langly replied, obviously going somewhere with that thought, before Frohike interrupted.  
  
"Yeah, as projectiles. That wasn't a food. That was a potato cannon and a twenty-two inch CRT monitor."  
  
"That I was standing next to!"  
  
"And you're fine, because it fell off the roof and you didn't." Frohike finally stopped trying to blot grease off the fritters.  
  
"One of those moments I'm still glad I missed," Byers said to Reid.  
  
"One, I had no idea that was going to happen right then, and two, I had no idea that cop was standing there." Langly glared at Frohike, over the table. "But, if _someone_ had given me another minute, we'd have waited for him to leave."  
  
"That wasn't me. It was Big Jimmy."   
  
"Oh, sure, blame it on the dead guy."  
  
"He wasn't dead when I started blaming that on him." Frohike switched from blotting grease to blotting the sweat off his forehead as he took a bite of salsa-soaked fritter. "Mostly because it was _his fault_."  
  
"What were you using for propellant to get it to go through the screen?" Reid asked, cutting a piece of fritter with the side of his fork. Langly might be eating with his hands, but the idea of that much grease on his fingers gave Reid pause.  
  
"Acetylene." Langly almost poured beer down his face when he couldn't quite pull in the edges of the smile that followed.  
  
" _Acetylene?_ Off a roof? Did you hit the next building over?" The fork frozen halfway to his mouth, Reid's face twisted into something between horror and delighted amazement.  
  
"I don't know about that. All I know is they almost hit me and we almost hit the cop in that alley with the monitor." Langly rested his forehead against his wrist, still holding the beer as he pointed at Frohike. "We had to throw Frohike across the alley on the other side, because there's no way he was tall enough to make that jump. _I_ barely made that jump."  
  
"You didn't make that jump. I caught you when you missed the fire escape railing," Frohike reminded him.  
  
"Okay, but how the hell did Jimmy make that jump?" Langly demanded. "Because I know we all ended up on the other side."  
  
"Like Batman. I don't want to know. I just remember grabbing you and hauling back before you could stop falling, and then that bony bumblefuck making a perfect superhero landing next to me. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was hiding a zip line."  
  
" _Do_ you know better?" Langly asked. "Because that sounds a lot more reasonable than anything else I can come up with, including a flying squirrel stunt."  
  
"What's he going to attach it to? How's he getting it across the alley?" Frohike shrugged and washed another salsa soaked bite down with beer.  
  
"We left him with the torch and the cannon!"  
  
"We'd have heard it!"  
  
"I seem to remember screaming bloody murder, at the time."  
  
"I stayed home, in case someone had to bail them out," Byers said, turning aside the next layer of paper towels to claim another fritter with his fork.  
  
"Which you didn't," Langly reminded him. "Because we didn't get caught."  
  
"I'm still stuck on the acetylene part," Reid admitted. "I'd love to have seen how far that potato went before it hit something capable of stopping it."  
  
"You know, we do own this place," Langly pointed out, with a sly smile. "The walls are blast-proof and pretty well insulated. We could build one in the basement and take shots the long way."  
  
"I bet we have most of the parts," Byers looked up, contemplatively. "We'd have to move some things, down there. I don't think we have a straight path, end to end, right now."  
  
"Shoot away from the loading dock," Frohike warned, pointing his fork in Langly's direction. "Half of that side's carved out, so the stopping power's better on the other end."  
  
"Okay, so, we'll move some shit around and see if we're missing any parts, and if it all goes well, we'll take some test shots, tomorrow," Langly decided. "I'm pretty sure I can rebuild that thing overnight, if we've got everything."  
  
"Indoors is a really bad idea..." Reid glanced around the table.  
  
"The building's a hundred feet long," Langly noted, leaning down the table to grab a pen, so he could scribble on a paper towel. "And the walls are blast-proof, backed by heavy concrete, and underground, if we're doing this in the basement. We're going to have mashed potatoes, I'm pretty sure."  
  
"But, you're firing something that would probably want earplugs outside," Reid argued, glancing at Frohike for confirmation.  
  
"We didn't have earplugs, then." Frohike nodded. "But, we do have earplugs, now."  
  
"I debate whether taking thirty decibels off the top is enough, once you add in the reflection off the walls."  
  
"Remote firing," Langly countered. "Less fun, but probably safer, and we've got enough cameras down there to get some wild footage, if we can catch enough frames per second."  
  
"Yeah, we didn't get any pictures, last time. I don't think we could have, even if we tried."  
  
"So what are we thinking? Pull the cars into the dock and fire down the length of the garage?" Byers continued to stare into the distance, over Langly's head. "If we keep the cannon in the crossing vault, we can seal it and deoxygenate, if anything goes wrong. It's probably the better idea, if we're going remote."  
  
"Any chance we can get the muzzle velocity and impact velocity?" Reid asked, hopefully.  
  
"Muzzle velocity's easy," Langly said, pointing at Byers. "You want to help me rig something that'll survive multiple impacts?"  
  
"Let's do it," Byers decided, slapping a hand onto the table. He cut a look at Reid. "This is going to be the most fun I've had in years."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, you [can do that with acetylene](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.0966.pdf). No, you really probably shouldn't.


	19. The Fifth Day

Byers and Langly stayed up all night, and for hours, Reid watched them work, checking implementations against the calculations they'd made. But, finally, Reid managed to fall asleep in the best chair in the house, just a bit to the side of where Langly was welding, drifting off in the middle of a sentence that had stopped making sense a few words earlier. The pages of notes he held slipped from his fingers and poured off his lap, as he shifted into a more comfortable position. Byers went to get him a blanket, tucking him in, mid-debate over the springs for the pressure plate.  
  
Hours passed, and Reid slept through most of them easily, only one nightmare taking the contented smile off his face. But, when Langly rested his foot on the chair, hands still busy with the igniter, and talked through the conclusions he and Byers had come to about the pressure plate, the small, frightened sounds stopped. Maybe it was the sound of his voice. Maybe it was just the reminder that things existed outside the dream.  
  
Finally, with most of the difficult parts finished, Langly decided it was time for a break of more than a few minutes for flipping through his notes. Byers went forward, to find Frohike, and Langly perched on the arm of the chair Reid slept in.  
  
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, you want to go to bed?"  
  
Reid made an inquisitive sound and squeezed his eyes tighter shut.  
  
"You want to move over a little so I can join you?"  
  
That was something Reid could manage, and he shifted back against the arm of the chair, making room for Langly, who slipped under the blanket and curled up around him. They were in the middle of the workroom, and Langly thought the cameras were probably on, unless Byers had killed them when he went to the front. They'd been documenting the build. But, right then, he couldn't bring himself to care. So, this would be documented, too. Maybe it deserved to be. Whatever happened, he'd have this to look back on. He threw a leg over Reid's hip, straightened the blanket, and tried to shake off the last can of Jolt.  
  
Up front, Frohike had fallen asleep in his desk chair, tipped back and snoring, and Byers nudged him awake, after turning on his own monitors to check on the recordings.  
  
Still yawning, Frohike blinked over at Byers's screen, where one of the cameras was focused on Reid and Langly sleeping. "They're so cute I'm gonna barf," he decided.  
  
"Of all of us, I never thought I'd see Langly like that," Byers admitted, finding himself almost envious at the simplicity, the casual warmth.  
  
"He's always been soft," Frohike scoffed, leaning in for a better look. "Soft in the heart and soft in the head."  
  
"And almost completely disinterested, until now." He wouldn't say it, but Byers wondered how long this would last, if Langly had it in him to make this work.  
  
"What? No. He always had something to say about a good looking woman." Frohike shook his head. "Come on, you remember the time he tried to convince us to put bikini girls on the front page?"  
  
"That was business. He was aiming for higher circulation numbers," Byers reminded him. "He only had something to say if you pointed him in the right direction, first. And he never had anything more than something to say. You'd try. _I'd_ try. You couldn't even get him to _look up_ , if he was working on something. And now, just... look at him. I don't think I've ever seen him look that comfortable, even _sleeping_."  
  
"Bothers you." Frohike observed, watching Byers's face, instead of the screen.  
  
"I envy them," Byers finally admitted.  
  
"You could've had that, but you picked this, instead. God only knows why."  
  
"No. It wouldn't have gone like that. Only in my dreams." Byers opened another window, pulling footage from the same camera and skipping back through it as he passed his headphones to Frohike. "Speaking of dreams, watch this. He's working on the igniter; I'm bevelling the plug cutter. I'm going to put the sound on."  
  
Frohike watched the nightmare start, the obvious shift in Reid's face, the way he folded up smaller. He'd seen enough nightmares to know that look. But, what he wasn't expecting was Langly's reaction. "Back that up a second and slow it down?"  
  
Byers did.  
  
Frohike tapped the screen. "He doesn't just put his foot up. Look at the way the chair moves. That's what would've happened if he'd sat down on the edge of the arm."  
  
"He's explaining the springs we picked for the impact plate," Byers said, returning playback to the normal speed and bringing the sound back up. "It's a total rubber duck moment. And it _works_."  
  
"This kid is weird," Frohike decided, watching Reid subtly shift in the chair, as if listening to Langly, the panicked sounds becoming less frequent and more inquisitive, until Reid fell into a still sleep again.  
  
"Because you really have room to talk." Byers watched himself working, on the screen. "I'll say it again. I want to make him an offer."  
  
"It's too soon," Frohike argued. "What if they have a fight and break up?"  
  
"Then we probably have to move anyway," Byers pointed out. "Besides which, didn't we take on Little Jimmy the day we met him?"  
  
"Jimmy bought his way in," Frohike reminded him. "That guy was a goddamn idiot, but he had money."  
  
"I'd argue that saving Langly's life also counts as a buy in."  
  
"Langly wouldn't have been in that position, if it wasn't for him."  
  
"We'd _all_ have been in that position, if it wasn't for him."  
  
Frohike paused, putting the headphones on the desk, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. "You really think she could've found us?"  
  
"I think she dug up Langly's _grave_ , hacked the DoD in such a way as to intentionally get caught and shift the blame to someone else, and tapped an FBI-issued phone. I don't think she'd have stopped until she found him, and if she found him, she'd find us. Just like Reid, we'd have been witnesses. So, yeah, I do think she could've found us. Maybe not as quickly, but ..." Byers shook his head. "Nobody got killed in _our house_. And she still doesn't know where we are, so I'm a lot less worried about a paid hit."  
  
"When the hell did _you_ get so paranoid?"  
  
"When the hell did you get less paranoid? We're supposed to be _dead_!" Byers gestured at the screen. "Anyway, he's been living with us for four days, and I like the way he thinks."  
  
"He's smarter than Jimmy," Frohike admitted. "But, we'd still have to rebuild the back."  
  
"We have to rebuild the back, even if he's just visiting. That or move Langly into the basement." Byers cleared his throat and offered Frohike a pained smile. "I mean, we really should've built the back right in the first place."  
  
"We didn't own the place, yet," Frohike reminded him. "You want to pay for it? Don't we have the quarterlies for the renovations downtown?"  
  
"Downtown's fine. The accounts are working properly, and everyone's getting paid on time. You're underestimating our reserves by a couple orders of magnitude." Byers turned on another monitor and looked through estimates from another recent construction project they'd funded. "We could go full soundproof vaults and put in the loft level we always wanted. There's really nothing stopping us any more."  
  
"Except the fact that we'd have to have people in to do it," Frohike pointed out.  
  
"We could live out of the basement for a few weeks and let Muringa handle things up here. We built _her_ place nicer than ours. She'll give us hell once she sees this place."  
  
"She got the loft level, a proper interior, _and_ a sauna with a skylight."  
  
"We can't have a skylight, Frohike. It compromises the security of the rest of the building. And considering you and skylights, you know that."  
  
"All right, all right, no skylight. Put the order in after the fed goes home, and let Muringa know what's going on."

* * *

The first thing Reid noticed was that the sound of the room was wrong. He woke up with his head on Langly's shoulder, folded up, like they always ended up in the chair. But, this was the wrong room.  
  
The night before came back to him, slowly. Langly and Byers perched on stools at one of the huge workbenches, the smell of hot metal, debates about which components to use in the sensors. His own retreat to the chair, after he'd yawned and nearly fallen off the edge of the table, where he'd been sitting. Had he fallen asleep in the workroom?  
  
His eyes opened, and a quick look revealed that was exactly what he'd done. And slept through Langly joining him and whatever weird dreams he might or might not have had, which was not the way these things worked. He didn't sleep that much, and now it was two days in a row. Just the stress, he decided. He'd be back to normal once he got back home.  
  
Langly woke when Reid moved, a confused noise catching in his chest as he stretched. "What time is it?"  
  
"I have no idea." Reid settled back against Langly's shoulder.  
  
"Should probably get breakfast." Langly realised he'd fallen asleep in his glasses, when he opened his eyes and found everything skewed, by the way they'd shoved up lopsidedly.  
  
"We built a potato cannon." Reid blinked a few times. "Do you even have any potatoes?"  
  
"Of course we h--" Langly stopped and considered his answer. Fresh potatoes? The kind one needed to do something like this? "Goddammit."  
  
"Yeah, the 'no fresh vegetables' thing didn't occur to any of us." Reid laughed, pressing his face against Langly's chest. "What was that about common sense?"  
  
"What time is it? I'll order potatoes. They'll be here in like two hours... From whenever it becomes a reasonable hour to order potatoes." Langly patted Reid's side. "You have to get up so I can get up."  
  
"Or you could just not get up," Reid suggested.  
  
"We're in the middle of the house. We have to get up. Byers and Frohike must have walked past us at least once, already."  
  
Reid groaned and unwrapped himself from Langly, taking the blanket with him as he got up, sweaty and rumpled. He looked down at himself. "Oh, that's... That's just great. I fell asleep in my clothes. And now I get to live with that."  
  
"Better than falling asleep naked, out here," Langly pointed out, pouring himself out of the chair and looking at the pile of parts on the workbench. "It's just screwing it all together, mounting the sensors, and aiming the cameras, now. Frohike took care of the basement, last night. You might have to move the seat back in your car."  
  
"My car is in--?" Reid rubbed one eye with his palm. "Start that again?"  
  
"Byers pulled it in through the loading dock and parked it next to ours."  
  
"Why the hell didn't we just come in that way in the first place?"  
  
"Because I could identify us a lot faster through the door." Langly shrugged. "Also? The shooting. The feds. The being _interrogated_ by your team about my intentions. I was a little distracted, and I just wanted to get us inside."  
  
"Seems reasonable," Reid decided. "Hey, if you're getting potatoes, can you get a few other things, too? I've got some ideas for lunch."  
  
"You don't _cook_."  
  
"You're right. I don't. But, I _can_. Sort of. Some things. You've had my grilled cheese sandwiches. Man cannot live on ramen noodles alone."  
  
"No, he can't. He'd get scurvy." Langly darted a nervous look at Reid and stood up a little straighter. "Not that I'd know that firsthand or anything. Of course not."  
  
"Why do I not believe you?" Reid looked concerned, if intrigued.  
  
"Probably because I'm full of shit?" Langly admitted, after a moment more. He tried to push his hair back and got his fingers tangled in it. "Give me a list, and we'll buy some food."

* * *

By early evening, everything was set up in the basement, a sack of potatoes resting next to the tripod-mounted cannon that sat in the airlock that joined the two sides of the basement with the steam tunnel exit vault and the stairs up. The room they'd chosen was virtually indestructible. Upstairs, Reid stood over the stove, assembling a meal he'd eaten a lot of, when he'd still been in one place long enough to cook for himself, on a regular basis.  
  
"We got it. It's ready to go." Langly looked excited, eyes bright, both hands on the edge of the kitchen doorway. "Back room, and we'll put it on the televisions?"  
  
"Come get a bowl," Reid said, turning off the pan he stood in front of and taking the lid off the pot next to it.  
  
"What is it?" Langly approached curiously. "It smells good."  
  
"Chicken and mushroom ramen." Reid laughed, self-consciously. "Chicken, mushrooms, and onions in a creamy chicken gravy, and... ramen. If I'm cooking for myself, I can do it in one pan, but there's four of us, so... Besides, separating out the noodles is a nightmare in one pan."  
  
"This may be the best thing I've ever seen done with a packet of noodles." Langly grabbed Reid's face and kissed his cheek.  
  
Minutes later, Langly sat on the couch with Byers and Frohike, Reid occupying the chair, all of them holding bowls of noodles and staring at the remote for the igniter on the table.  
  
"Who's going to take the first shot?" Byers asked.  
  
"More importantly, who's going to load the next shot?" Frohike corrected.  
  
"New rule," Langly decided. "Whoever fires it loads the next one. Whoever fires the last one opens it up to cool." He picked up the remote. "I'm first. I got shot _at_ last time."  
  
"I hope that pressure plate holds up," Byers muttered, winding noodles onto his fork.  
  
"One way to find out." Langly hit the button and Reid's eyes jumped to the screen with the velocity readings.  
  
"Holy shit," Frohike breathed, watching a potato stain appear on the target on the far wall. "Talk about instant mashed potatoes."  
  
"That was amazing!" Langly crowed. "Run it back in slow-mo!"  
  
"Do we have enough frames? Did we catch it?" Byers asked, reaching for the laptop on the floor next to him, swapping it for the bowl in his lap.  
  
"Barely," Langly replied, as Byers slowed it down and played it back.  
  
"If the graphs are right, it left the muzzle at almost a hundred and forty metres per second, and hit at almost the same, less than a second later. Obviously. Because there's only about ninety feet between the end of the barrel and the target." Reid stared in amazement. "You could kill somebody with that. I mean, that's always true with a potato cannon, but not usually at distances greater than fifty metres or so. With enough altitude and a good angle, you could take somebody's head off half a mile out, with that thing!"  
  
"Potato sniper: the most dangerous man in Idaho." Langly held his hands up as if framing a title.  
  
Frohike cleared his throat obnoxiously, muttering 'Nebraska' in the middle, and Langly slapped him in the back of the head, knocking his glasses into his noodles.  
  
Langly put his bowl on the table and got up. "You want the next shot, Byers?"  
  
Byers, in the middle of swapping the laptop for his noodles, looked at him like he was crazy. "... Yeah," he said, nodding.  
  
Reid watched Langly, carefully, taking note of every step in the process of airing and loading the cannon. He didn't want to admit he'd never been allowed to actually touch one. Sure, he'd helped design one, in college, but he'd been fifteen, and nobody wanted to take responsibility for letting him use the thing. Eventually, this time, it would be his turn.  
  
"This is really good," Byers said, pointing to the noodles, as Frohike got up to actually wash his glasses.  
  
"It's fairly low-effort. Low cost. It's lazy college food." Reid shrugged, winding another bite onto his fork.  
  
"Okay, when I was in college, 'lazy college food' was even lazier," Byers protested. "It usually just involved a can opener, a spoon, and maybe a bag of potato chips."  
  
"And a can of something, one presumes."  
  
"Baked beans, more often than not. Sometimes peas, when beans were too expensive. Fancy was creamed peas and margarine on saltines. I brought that to a party one time."  
  
"I think I had that at a party, one time," Reid admitted, watching Langly disappear from the screen as he came back up the stairs. "Monthly thing one of the Engineering TA's used to do. Dinner and a movie. I think that night was The Exorcist. Almost everybody brought something with peas."  
  
"Why are we talking about peas?" Langly asked, stepping back into the room.  
  
"Weird things we ate in college," Byers explained, picking up the remote and leaning to the side to see if he could catch Frohike coming back in.  
  
"I never ate anything weird in college." Langly settled on the couch, looking scandalised.  
  
"Probably because you never went to college." Byers raised his eyebrows.  
  
Langly huffed and changed the subject, picking up his noodles. "Where's Frohike?"  
  
"Washing his glasses, still. Better question: what's in that sauce?" Byers shot a concerned look at Reid.  
  
"It's a white gravy -- flour, water, chicken fat, ramen seasoning. I'd suggest dish soap, if he ever expects to get the grease off."  
  
Langly had turned to say something to Byers when Frohike came in from the kitchen and cracked him across the back of the head hard enough to repeat the sequence for another pair of glasses.  
  
Reid covered his mouth and said nothing at all, breathing slowly to contain the laugh this supremely ridiculous situation deserved.  
  
"Dish soap?" Langly asked, fishing his glasses out of the bowl and getting up.  
  
"Dish soap," Reid choked out, as Langly headed for the kitchen, looking much less than amused.  
  
"Just so you know, I'm not waiting for you," Byers called after Langly.  
  
"You've already waited twenty years. Another five minutes isn't going to kill you," Langly retorted.  
  
"If you don't push that button, I'm pushing that button," Frohike declared, pointing at Byers.  
  
"If you push the button, you're loading the next potato." Byers held the button out of Frohike's reach.  
  
Frohike lunged across Byers for the button.  
  
"If you drop your glasses in my dinner, I'm not going to be happy," Byers warned.  
  
Langly re-appeared, slapping Frohike in the back of the head, again, as he walked past the back of the couch and plucked the button out of Byers's hand. "My turn again? Thanks, Byers."  
  
As Langly hit the button, Byers was left to fish Frohike's glasses out of his dinner.  
  
"I hate both of you. I just want you to know that." Byers dropped the gravy-covered glasses into Frohike's lap.  
  
Langly tossed the button to Reid. "Tell me something I don't know," he said, on his way back down to reload.


	20. Chapter 20

"I'm not sure that last reading was any good. That or there's something wrong with the cannon." Reid pointed to the screen that held the velocity measurements.  
  
"I think we broke it." Byers leaned forward, squinting at the main screen, which was focused on the pressure plate, albeit from much too far away.  
  
Langly groaned and slumped on the couch, head back, shoving his hands under his glasses to rub his eyes. "Which part?"  
  
"The smaller spring, probably. Or the casing." Byers shoved an empty bowl out of his way and switched cameras. "I can't tell from here."  
  
"Well, overall, the readings have been pretty consistent," Reid noted, looking back at the main screen. "If it's the sensor that's broken, that doesn't really matter at this point."  
  
"No, but we should probably rest the cannon," Langly muttered against his palms, unmoving. "It was getting a little hot on the last reload."  
  
"I'll clear it and seal up the vault," Byers volunteered.  
  
"So, that went better than the last time." Frohike stacked the bowls.  
  
"If you mean we didn't defy the laws of physics running away from a pissed off cop, then yeah, that was better. If you mean you didn't almost shoot me with a potato of instant death, that was _definitely_ better." Langly's hands dropped to his sides, leaving him staring at the ceiling.  
  
"Speaking of potatoes of instant death, we should probably find whatever's left of them, before they go bad, down there," Reid pointed out. "I'm pretty sure we didn't actually vaporise them."  
  
"One, two, three, not it," Frohike declared, picking up the bowls and heading for the kitchen.  
  
"I think I'm weak from too much huffing vapour," Langly complained.  
  
Byers looked annoyed, but Reid cut in.  
  
"If you're going down anyway, I'll help."  
  
"I make absolutely no promises about what I'm going to say if you leave me alone with your boyfriend, Langly," Byers warned. "I'm pretty sure I've got stories you only wish I'd forgotten."  
  
Langly groaned. "Tell him whatever you want. I'll deny it all later."  
  
"Believably?" Reid asked, getting out of the chair, with no small amount of regret.  
  
"Maybe not to _your_ powers of federal mind-reading," Langly huffed, crossing his ankles on the coffee table.  
  
"It's not mind-reading. It's body-reading," Reid corrected, following Byers toward the stairs. "And what's with this 'boyfriend' thing? I'm not sure this is that involved. I'm pretty sure we had that conversation."  
  
Byers waited to answer, until he was sure he was far enough down that Langly wouldn't hear him in the echoes. They'd disabled the sound for the downstairs cameras, specifically for the cannon. "Believably?" he asked, turning Reid's query back on him.  
  
"I thought so, at the time." Reid looked quizzically at Byers, holding the cannon in place as Byers unscrewed the end. "Where are you getting this?"  
  
"He's not like this. I've known him for almost thirty years, and this is not normal behaviour." Byers set the end cap aside and tilted the cannon down to get a look through it from the back.  
  
Reid knew that. Everything Langly had said led him to that same conclusion. Still, he was going to pick this scab and find out what it bled. "You don't _think_ he's like this. As far as I know, you also thought he was a virgin."  
  
"Frohike thought he was a virgin," Byers corrected, stepping out the vault door and pulling a broom from the clip bar on the outside of the vault wall. He gently tossed a dustpan to Reid. "It wasn't any of my business. It still wouldn't be any of my business if he wasn't actively trying to freak out Frohike."  
  
"I think he's actually just getting comfortable with--" Reid caught himself in the middle of the sentence. "You're right. It's not your business. And I don't think you want to know, either."  
  
"Thank you." Byers looked up and pointed. "Cameras every ten feet, with a twenty foot view. Even if half of them go out, we still have everything covered. Make a note of where they are and tip your head down if you're going to say something you don't want Langly lip reading." He said it directly to a camera, and smiled.  
  
"The three of you seem to have some strange rivalry going on that I don't begin to understand. You obviously care a great deal about each other, but--"  
  
"Brothers." Byers cut off the end of the sentence. "You're looking at us in the wrong context. We've known each other for thirty years. We all know where all the buttons are, and which ones are safe to push."  
  
"You're kidding me."  
  
"Not really!" Byers started sweeping as they got closer to the target, catching tiny bits of crushed potato that had bounced and rolled. "It's part of why I couldn't bring myself to leave, even after the first ten years. Other reasons, too, but that played into it. They're crazy. We got into some incredibly dangerous stuff, together. But, after the first few days, I realised I didn't have to be afraid of them. Okay, fine, after that night we spent in jail, in Baltimore. We were on the same side, and we had bigger problems. And, later, we actually started liking each other."  
  
"Frohike talks about Langly like he's a feral cat," Reid pointed out.  
  
"Langly basically _is_ a feral cat. You've seen the file." The chunks of potato got closer together, as they moved closer to the target.  
  
"Obviously not enough of it."  
  
"You know he grew up on a farm in Nebraska, right? He doesn't talk about his family, much. 'My mom's pickle fritters' is probably the only mention I've heard of them in the last ten years. But, he's got manners and basic skills like he was raised with them. He sure didn't learn that from me." Byers stopped sweeping to make the finger quotes, and then kept on. "It's been thirty years and neither of us know where he was living before he moved in with Frohike, but everything he owned fit in an army duffel. Frohike's pretty sure he was staying at the Y. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have provided enough space and privacy for the work he was doing and he was squatting somewhere with running water. But, if you ask him? Straight from Nebraska to moving in with Frohike, and no mention of the years between those points. And there were years between those points, because he and Frohike ran in the same circles. He's really good at misdirection, when he's not blatantly lying. He's a terrible liar."  
  
"I've noticed that. It's why I don't have any reason to doubt him." Reid crouched with the dustpan, dumping the potato remains into the bucket they'd hoped would catch them. None of them had predicted quite that much force, though.  
  
"Then it might be time to have that conversation again. I'm pretty sure he's serious about this. I've never seen him look at anything but hardware, the way he looks at you."  
  
"It's the endorphins." Reid looked up at Byers, deadpan, and went back to scooping up piles of potato.  
  
Byers gave up. It wasn't actually his business, in the end. "So, Langly aside, I've been meaning to ask you something."  
  
"X-File?" Reid asked, standing up as Byers continued sweeping.  
  
"No. Well, not directly." Byers reached into a shelf and swept potato bits off a case of spark plugs. "I was wondering if you'd... consider working with us again."  
  
Reid looked confused. "In what way?"  
  
"Just looking things over. Having opinions. We've... been four, instead of three, at times. An outside perspective is always valuable."  
  
"Don't ask me to do anything illegal. Don't use my name or my work in any way that might make it look like I did something illegal. But, if I have the time, yeah. I'd look at some more things for you." Reid nodded, thinking that he already peer reviewed articles for a journal, in his spare time, and that working with whatever Byers sent him wouldn't be that much different. Call out the holes, ask questions about implications that might've been overlooked, occasionally offer advice.  
  
"I'm pretty sure we don't really do 'illegal' in any way you'd be caught up in. Not any more." Byers shook his head and swept more potato out of the corners. "But, I'll take extra care to ensure you're not linked to us, except pseudonymously, because credit should be given for your work."  
  
"As long as I don't end up attributed as 'Special Agent Sex Object' or whatever the latest iteration is..." Reid looked equal parts amused and annoyed. "Actually, if you could leave my affiliations out entirely, that would be great."  
  
"Dr Sensible," Byers teased.  
  
"Pretty sure that's already in use." Reid crouched to get the most recent pile of potato. "And I'm not that sensible. We got all the way through building a potato cannon, and it didn't occur to me to ask if we had potatoes."  
  
"Yeah, but you don't live here. It should have occurred to one of us. And it still occurred to you first."  
  
"Half a pound of cream cheese." Reid dumped more potato into the bucket.  
  
"Okay, _that_ was pretty insensible," Byers admitted.  
  
"Another point: I'm not moving in. Fourth in a party of three or not, I have a home. I live there." Reid held up a finger.  
  
"For which I am grateful." Byers stopped sweeping and held up his hands. "But, I hope you'll still visit, occasionally. We'll be scheduling some renovations to make things a little more bearable and less ... loud."  
  
"I am so incredibly sorry about that. Do you want us to stop, until after...?"  
  
"Absolutely not." Byers looked down at the potato chunks he was sweeping, turning away from the nearest camera. "I'm happy for him. And you, but comparatively, I barely know you. Maybe I'd rather not hear it, but it's not that bad, no matter what Frohike says. We have headphones, and you make Langly happy."  
  
"I can make him happy more quietly, if necessary."  
  
"I don't think you can. I'm really pretty sure he's doing it to get under Frohike's skin." Byers laughed and shook his head.  
  
Reid was relatively sure that making Frohike uncomfortable was just a bonus, but he wasn't going to say that. "Have we got all the potatoes?"  
  
"We only shot about six pounds of them, and even then, they were cut to fit." Byers picked up the bucket. "That feels like it's probably about five pounds."  
  
"So we check the scraps for the other pound, and hope nothing got behind the shelves?"  
  
Byers looked momentarily horrified, and then headed back down the length of the garage. "If we missed any, Langly can find it."  
  
"You think?" Reid asked, eyeing the shelves as he passed them.  
  
"Oh, yeah. If anything even starts to go off, down here, he'll tear the place apart to find it." Byers smiled innocently. "He throws up at the drop of a hat. He's pretty fastidious about making sure nothing smells worse than a few days of sweat. His laundry is genuinely as bad as he gets."  
  
"The laundry's not that bad, except the part where he leaves it all over the floor. It's not the smell, it's the tripping on it." Reid put the dustpan back where Byers had gotten it and picked up the bucket of scraps in one hand and the bag of whole potatoes in the other, comparing the weights. "Yeah, that feels pretty close."  
  
Back upstairs, Langly was napping on the couch in exactly the position they'd left him. Byers took the good potatoes from Reid and went to put them in the kitchen. Reid leaned on the back of the couch, looking down at Langly's sleeping face. It was entirely possible not to wake him, but... He put his finger in the middle of Langly's forehead.  
  
Langly woke up instantly, swatting and flailing, and Reid stepped back just enough not to get hit.  
  
"Oh," Langly said, after a few moments, tipping his head back even further, to see who was standing behind him. "Hey."  
  
"Hey." Reid leaned on the couch, again. "Are you going to let Byers call me your boyfriend with impunity?"  
  
"That sounds like it's between you and Byers," Langly decided, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  
  
"I told him we'd already had that conversation. I was pretty tired when we had that conversation, but I do remember most of it, like the part where you don't do serious." Reid paused, blinking. "He said we should have that conversation again, because he thinks you're wrong."  
  
"I think this is a stupid position to be having this conversation in, and I also think this room is rigged for sound and video," Langly pointed out, gesturing toward the door to the back.  
  
"I'm not letting you distract me with sex," Reid warned, one finger pointing at Langly, even as he stepped back again, to give Langly room to get up.  
  
"If we have this conversation first, then can I distract you with sex?" Langly laughed and led the way out, with a single-finger salute at a camera Reid couldn't make out.  
  
Langly turned and tossed himself onto the bed, bouncing into a sitting position as the springs recoiled. "Okay, so. Serious and do I do it. I have no idea. I don't know what this is. I don't know what I'm doing. But, I kind of like it, and if you're into it, I want to keep doing it."  
  
"I'm pretty into it," Reid admitted, sitting carefully next to Langly, leaving space between them. "I just don't know how this works. I haven't really had the best luck. In a few days, I'm going to go home, and then...? I suppose we go back to the occasional dinner and serial chair accidents? I'm going back to work, soon. I'm barely in town. It's really hard to make plans in advance."  
  
"I'm pretty okay with spontaneity." Langly rested his elbows on his thighs, folding his hands between his legs. "I built new phones, since ours are evidence. Call me when you land, and I'll pick up dinner and meet you."  
  
"You ended up walking fifteen miles, the last time you tried that," Reid pointed out.  
  
"I wasn't prepared, the last time I tried that. I wasn't even a real person. I'll take a cab, like a reasonable person." Langly shrugged staring at the floor between his feet. "I have an identity. I might as well use it. Just... not from here. A mile or two, not fifteen."  
  
"You really want to put yourself through that?"  
  
"Listen, we have something good. If we work on it, it can be something better. I mean, it's the same principle almost everything works on. You build a prototype and then you mess with it until it's viable." Langly stopped, tipping his head and leaning to the side a bit. "Admittedly, more dangerous than any other projects I have going, but probably worth it." He finally looked up, not quite looking at Reid. "I like you. I like being with you."  
  
"I like you, too. And I like your family. And I like that you don't tell me to stop talking in the middle of a sentence." Reid moved a hand toward Langly, along the edge of the bed, but wound up just gripping the sheet.  
  
"There are a pretty small set of circumstances where I'd tell you to stop talking, and they're all safety-related, and I'd expect the same courtesy from you." Langly finally smiled, a bare ghost of a thing.  
  
"Well, yeah, but that's different," Reid scoffed, moving himself closer to Langly. "There's a time and a place for a good 'shut the fuck up', pardon my Saxon."  
  
Langly's eyes drifted to Reid's face, and his head followed the turn, his own face utterly starstruck. "Is this the part where I get to distract you with sex?"  
  
"Ye-- Wait." Reid held up a finger, between them. "One question, because Byers put it in my head."  
  
"Oh god, what shit is Byers talking now?" Langly rolled his eyes.  
  
"Where were you living, before you got arrested in Baltimore?"  
  
Langly started laughing uncontrollably, folding forward until his forehead rested on Reid's shoulder. "Okay, okay, but you absolutely can't tell either of them this, because watching them try to figure it out has been completely hilarious. Byers actually almost had it right, one time, but I wasn't going to tell him that."  
  
"Nobody's going to hear it from me," Reid promised, wondering how strange the answer could be.  
  
"I was the night clerk at a hotel that charged by the hour. The day clerk and I had the only two ground floor rooms. I used to do my soldering at the desk. The girls didn't mind." Langly paused, coughing as the laughter stopped. "I liked most of them. They were nice. Stoned out of their minds, but nice people." He sat up and pushed his glasses up. "But, you know, shit happened. And I didn't really want to tell Frohike or Byers where I'd been staying. Frohike would've asked me to hook him up. Byers would've been grossed out. And with the whole thing with the feds and the cops suddenly knowing my name, I really didn't want to bring that back there. You don't do that to your friends. So, I went back in the middle of the night, and Davs was pretty pissed, because he'd had to cover while I was in jail and then the next night, because I couldn't get home. And then he was _really_ pissed, when I packed up and tried to leave, but I told him I'd gotten busted and there were feds looking for me, and then he practically threw me out, just so I wouldn't get cop germs on him. Maybe not my best moment."  
  
"Cop germs." Reid opened his mouth, as if to say something else, but just closed it again and gestured at himself.  
  
"Hey, you know what? One, fed germs, not cop germs. And two? I was twenty-one. You wouldn't have even pinged my radar, when I was twenty-one, you know why? Because you were like nine." Langly leaned back and sprawled across the bed. "I'm trying really hard not to think about that fact, too."  
  
"I was also in Las Vegas, which is nowhere near Baltimore. The whole time I've been anywhere you might have run into me, I've been... at _least_ of an age where that wouldn't be horrible. Probably better it took this long, though. I don't think I'd have taken any of this nearly as well, even three years ago."  
  
"God, you really are a lot younger than me, aren't you?" Langly jammed his hands under his glasses, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.  
  
"You still want to do this?" Reid half expected this to be Langly's breaking point.  
  
"You're over thirty, and I've been dead for fifteen years. I don't think anyone's got room to talk, unless it's about you and necro--" Langly stopped in the middle of the word. "Shit. I'm sorry. That's less funny than I thought it was."  
  
It took Reid a moment to catch his breath in the sudden stillness. "In the context in which you _meant_ it? It's still pretty funny," he admitted.  
  
"Wow, I am just... not rolling well on wisdom or charisma, tonight. How to go from 'probably getting laid' to 'probably sleeping on the couch' in two minutes or less," Langly groaned.  
  
"It's... your bed," Reid pointed out. "If anyone's sleeping on the couch, which I hope is not the case, it's me."  
  
"There is no way you're sleeping on the couch. This is a very nice bed, and you are welcome to enjoy it. I'm the one rolling non-stop critical fails, tonight; I'll take the couch, if you don't want to sleep next to me after that. I just... two in a row."  
  
"It's not a thing, yet," Reid teased. "You haven't hit three."  
  
Langly rolled onto his side and curled up, laughing, hands still covering his eyes.


	21. Chapter 21

More dressed than not, Langly and Reid lay curled together on the bed, the way they tended to sleep in the chair, blankets pulled up not for warmth but for comfort.  
  
"I want this to work. I want us both to be happy. I want you to be _safe_." Reid didn't figure he had to explain that last again. "Are you really sure commuting like that is a good idea? Because last week, you were pretty sure it was a terrible idea."  
  
"Last week, I had about four impromptu disguises, no living identity, and three hackers I hadn't talked to in fifteen years suddenly in some kind of unknown danger. Yeah, I was a little jumpy. I've had most of a week to think about it, and I'm pretty sure I've worked out most of the bugs. The rest will come out in testing." Langly looked down and kissed Reid's forehead.  
  
"Bugs that come out in testing may be fatal," Reid reminded him.  
  
"Crossing the street could be fatal. I could get hit by a bus." Langly went back to probabilities. "I'm not going to say nothing's going to happen. I can't promise that. But, the chance of anything going that kind of wrong is so remote..."  
  
"It can't happen again. I can't watch that. I can't handle it." Reid held on tighter to Langly's shirted chest, his other hand clenched white-knuckled against his own chest. "Once was one time too many."  
  
"I thought I was the one who couldn't handle corpses," Langly teased, and realised his mistake as Reid shoved himself up, eyes flashing.  
  
The fury that broke over Reid wasn't rational, and he knew it as it happened, as he grabbed it and dragged it back, with a long shaking breath. "Sorry," he breathed, blinking in confusion. "I don't... I'm still a little..."  
  
"I just keep putting my foot in that one, tonight." Langly offered an arm to Reid, inviting him back down.  
  
"It's the subject. I-- We almost met, once, she and I. Just once. But, I thought I saw someone waiting for her -- she was already in danger, and I knew it. It's why we'd been so careful, so far apart. I called her and told her not to come in. I was wrong, then. I didn't see it clearly. I thought I was looking for a _man_. And she... she died anyway. There was nothing I could do. Or maybe there was, and I just couldn't see it, then. I've gone over it a thousand times." Reid stayed where he was, eyes wet and angry, face a mask of despair. "And what we're talking about... It's the same thing again. It's tempting fate. You're already in danger, and every time we meet... I keep telling myself at least there will be memories, this time. Something more than a voice. But, that doesn't matter as much as I thought I would. Maybe that makes it worse. I don't know."  
  
Langly reached up and tucked Reid's hair behind his ear with one finger. "We've talked about this. It's my life. It's my death. I don't want to live like this any more -- it's like being stuck in an aquarium with one-way glass. I can only see out, and nothing comes in. And then there's you. You're a different kind of real. You're ... god, I can't say that, it sounds like you're just an anchor. I would still like you, even if I'd never touched you, never seen you. I've liked plenty of people who were never more than text on a screen, because that's what I do. I do text. I know text, and how people use it. The fact that you're an excuse to go outside is just that -- an excuse. It's not the only possible reason I could have, it's just the only one I've found at all compelling. I like you. I like being with you. It's different. And if the Black Queen found us like that, we weren't as safe as I thought we were, anyway."  
  
Langly took a breath. "I've been dead for years, and I've been living like a ghost -- _through_ ghosts. You make me feel alive, again. You make me feel like I'm more alive than when I was out there running for my life because Mulder found fucking _aliens_ , and an old friend of ours got killed over it. It's like the universe isn't just offering me a second chance, it's offering me a second chance with frosting on top, and honestly, I'm pretty keen on licking frosting." He paused, trying to sort out that metaphor. "You're the frosting. I like licking you."  
  
Reid laughed, because there was nothing else to do. "You're out of your mind."  
  
"I'm a goddamn genius." Langly poked Reid in the forehead.  
  
"Sometimes, I'm not sure there's a difference." Reid finally curled up against Langly's shoulder again. "Case in point lying right next to you."  
  
"Common sense is overrated anyway." Langly waved a dismissive hand, before he dropped it on Reid's shoulder. "You convinced yet?"  
  
"I don't want to think about it. Weren't you supposed to be distracting me with sex?"  
  
"Only after we finished that conversation. And it keeps coming back around."  
  
"Distract harder," Reid decided, tossing a leg over Langly and pushing himself back up just high enough for a kiss. This relationship -- whatever it was -- would ruin him, he knew -- a death, a disappearance, Langly finally getting bored with him. The wise thing would be to stop now. To walk away, while there was still some chance he could get over it. But, he didn't want to. He wanted to touch, to taste, to experience. He wanted to watch Langly riding him, half-dressed, dripping, and desperate for more. He wanted to wake up next to this man. Maybe he'd get his head together, when he got back home, but home was where this had started, so he doubted it, on some level. Maybe it would change, once he went for another case out of town. He needed better control of himself, he thought, but with Langly making encouraging sounds into his mouth, he didn't want it. He just wanted Langly. And really, that was terrifying. And maybe he'd care, when they were done.  
  
Langly's hands were on him, sliding under the pyjamas he wore, squeezing his ass, clutching his back hard enough to buckle the flesh. And Reid just let himself writhe, lost in the sensation, gasping into the kiss for fresh air and getting only Langly's breaths. Something flitted through his head about shared breathing and induced hallucinations, but he couldn't quite catch the tail of the thought. Good. He needed to stop thinking. Just for right now. Just for right now, he needed to forget everything but the slow burn that spread through him, as Langly pulled him closer, clutched at him harder, as if trying to meld with his body.  
  
Reid wrapped a hand in Langly's shirt and rolled, dragging Langly on top of him. "You want me? Show me."  
  
"There are very few things in the world I have _ever_ wanted, like I want you." Langly picked at the buttons on Reid's pyjamas, one-handed. "Most of them have been electronic. All of them, if you count Kimmy, which you shouldn't, because that wasn't like this at all, not because I don't occasionally suspect he was a cyborg."  
  
Reid grabbed Langly's shoulders with one hand and then the other, shedding the top of his pyjamas. "Different? Tell me. _Show_ me."  
  
Langly leaned in close, breathing the words against Reid's ear, one hand sliding down to squeeze and tease the jutting ridge of Reid's hip. "I wanted him to throw me against a wall and bang me like a cheap screen door. Fast and hard and done before anyone noticed we were gone." His thumb traced down the inner curve, following the line of the muscles. "I want you like that, too. Shoved in hard and tight. You always feel so good." He shivered, fingers skittering along Reid's inner thigh. "But, I want to see you. I want to watch you. I want to touch you, kiss you, wake up next to you. I want to put my hands all over you until you're wild with it, until you demand that I fuck you. God, that gets me hot. I want to come inside you, aching and shaking, and then lean back and let you have me. You are, without question, the best I've ever had."  
  
Considering the company, Reid didn't find that last surprising. Sad, maybe, but not surprising. Not that he had room to talk. His list was shorter than Langly's. The rest of it, though, was surprisingly distracting. He'd never found that sort of thing appealing in books or films, but there was definitely something to be said for having it whispered in his ear by someone he already wanted to have sex with.   
  
"I want you." Reid's hand tangled in Langly's hair, taking a loose grip just under the base of his skull. "Just you and nothing more." He paused. "Well, you, me, and a few prepositions: in, on, under, around..."  
  
Langly turned his head and snorted. "You, me, and a few good _propositions_."  
  
"Only if you follow through."  
  
"Pretty sure that's another preposition."  
  
"Pretty sure I'm not interested in propositions without excellent use of prepositions. And verbs. Definitely verbs." Reid's shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. He would _not_ laugh this close to Langly's ear.  
  
"I'm pretty sure I already delivered on the verbs." Langly nipped under Reid's ear and worked his way down. "Might be a little light on prepositions, but I'm sure those will come up in the implementation."  
  
"I hope they're not the only thing that comes up during implementation," Reid teased, raising one hip and trying to shove down his pyjama pants with one hand.  
  
"Oh, definitely not the only thing." Langly moved his hand and dropped his hips, pressing proof of the point against Reid's thigh.  
  
Reid opened his mouth to say something, but lost it when Langly's teeth caught his nipple. After several licks worth of intense concentration, he found at least part of the thought. "Less pants."  
  
"I thought I'd get some more 'on' and 'atop', before getting to 'into', or maybe 'onto', 'off', and 'inside'." The words were a little muffled by the flicks of tongue Langly used for punctuation.  
  
"Mmm, onto. Onto _then_ into." Reid wrapped a leg around Langly's, pants now in some uncomfortable quarter-off position.  
  
"Other way," Langly argued, finally letting Reid's nipple slip out of his teeth. He finished the thought, once Reid's eyes rolled back down. "Into you, then onto you. Unlike you, I'd never make it to the second part, the other way."  
  
Reid had to close his eyes to string a sentence together. "We should work on that. I bet we could make it work. We're creative."  
  
"For you to make that work, I'm pretty sure you'd have to ascend to godhood." Langly gently pinched Reid's other nipple.  
  
"Where there's a will, there's a series of questionable hypotheses, just waiting to be tested." Reid gave up on his own pants and tugged at Langly's boxers.  
  
"Twelve seconds," Langly reminded him.  
  
"Who says it has to be the first one?"  
  
The idea rattled through Langly's head like a pinball, bouncing off any number of things he thought he knew. Yes, twice was _possible_ , but the second one didn't usually get him hard enough for what Reid had in mind. Still, what's the worst thing that could happen? He'd be too sore to try again, tomorrow. "You ready to be disappointed, if this doesn't work?"  
  
"I'm pretty sure there's enough orgasms to go around, whether or not this works as intended," Reid pointed out. "And any disappointment I may have felt in bed, on a chair, or up against a wall, with you, was transitory and ended when we figured out another way to approach the problem. And I have a long list of hypotheses, right now."  
  
"I'm sold." Langly pushed himself up and kicked his boxers the rest of the way off, waiting for Reid to wriggle out of his pants, gazing down at the expanse of bare flesh beneath him. As his eyes drifted back up, he found Reid looking quizzically at him. "Sorry. Just enjoying the view."  
  
Reid looked down the length of his body. "Not much of a view. Maybe it's better from up there."  
  
Langly caught Reid's eye and nodded enthusiastically, before he leaned over for the lube and a _new_ condom that hadn't been sitting in the drawer for a decade or more. "If we're going to do this with any chance of it working, use _way_ too much lube. I mean, I know me. It's probably not going to be the second one, either. I've never seen a third, but for the purposes of this experiment, let's postulate a third. I'm pretty sure if this is going to happen, it's going to happen between two and three. Or at least after two."  
  
"I know I probably haven't said it, but you should know how impressed I actually am that you even get to two." Reid rolled the condom on, noticing the difference in texture from the ones that had been in the drawer before. He picked up the wrapper. Same brand, just newer. Great. That said something about the quality of the latex after how long they'd been sitting, and he didn't want to think about it. It was too late, now, and they hadn't torn any of the ones they'd used. And really, it _didn't_ matter that much, and he knew it.  
  
"I wish I'd known that second one was possible before I hit thirty," Langly scoffed, pulling his legs up to kneel across Reid's hips. "Would've made a difference, then."  
  
"Makes a difference now," Reid pointed out, running his fingers down the inside of Langly's thigh.  
  
"I'm still convinced the superiority of fifteen minutes or more is situational, but I'm definitely liking the situations that lead to it." Langly put the bottle of lube in Reid's other hand. "You know Frohike's going to kill us for this, right? I get loud somewhere around two. If we're going for three..."  
  
"Byers has informed me that Frohike has good headphones." Reid flipped the lube open and poured it into his hand, smearing his fingers through it before he slipped that hand between himself and Langly. "It's his problem, not ours."  
  
The conversation ended there, as Reid's fingers prodded teasingly and Langly  threw his head back, eyes closed, focused on that one hand touching him. No distractions, no confusion, no shivering and trying to hold on to the desire that flared and then _burned_. Just this one hand, right where he wanted it. He leaned back and let his hands span Reid's thighs. Reid's other hand touched him, then, slowly stroking his inner thigh. So simple, yet so effective. Langly felt the first drop wicked away from his skin, his dick caught on the hem of his shirt, and he glanced down in annoyance, just as Reid tucked the shirt back, with one finger.  
  
Reid misunderstood the look. "Sorry, should I put that back? It looked... uncomfortable."  
  
Langly shook his head. "No, not you. The shirt. You beat me to it."  
  
"You want to come down here?" Reid asked, and Langly shook his head, again.  
  
"Between one and two," he promised. "I like this. Ask me when you're not doing that and I can put the right words in the right order. It's good."  
  
As Reid pressed his fingers in, curling them in that way he knew Langly liked, Langly's head fell back again, and he could watch the shift in Langly's breathing, a change he'd heard and felt, but was usually too close to see.  
  
"Wrist up?" Langly suggested, sounding uncertain, but when Reid's hand changed position, any doubt was gone. His hips rolled and he ground down against the fingers inside him and the heel of Reid's palm, legs suddenly tense. "Just like that -- just like that -- oh, fuck, please, _Reid_!"  
  
"Yeah? Just like this?" Reid curled his fingers.  
  
Langly almost bit through his own lip, suddenly leaning forward, hands coming to rest on Reid's shoulders. He just stared, wild eyed and trying to find words, as Reid's hand brought him closer to the inevitable edge. With the last bit of sense he could find, Langly grabbed the bottle of lube, flipped it open, and splashed it across Reid's crotch, hitting everything between Reid's hips, including his arm, which was not at all what Langly had been aiming for. "Put it in me," he demanded.  
  
After a few moments' struggle, Langly remembered he had to lift his hips before that was going to happen, and that meant less of that perfect touch. But, he had something in mind, and it came back to him in flashes, when he had a mind to hold it in. He eased himself down, trying to keep himself together just a little longer, and as Reid's hand began to pull out from between them, he grabbed it and shook his head. "Same place."  
  
The fingers teased and stroked, until they found where the heel of that hand had probably been. Three fingers curled, pressed gently up -- and Langly slammed himself down, legs so tense the ache cut through the pleasure. He ran out of words. Couldn't remember what they were or why he had ever cared about anything other than the agony of pleasure between his thighs. Light speckled his vision and he could feel that hard pulse start low, just in front of the fingers pressed against him. His hips canted back, driving those fingers down, wringing Reid's dick inside him, and everything was sweet and bright.  
  
Reid swallowed hard as his own knuckles slammed down at right about bladder height. Not the most comfortable sensation in the world, but Langly would ease up soon, and he knew it, each spatter arcing up his chest a little less far than the one before it.  
  
Langly gasped for breath, the shiver he'd been avoiding settling into his arms and legs. "Okay, that was... I'm just..." He pulled Reid's hand out from between them and let himself collapse, burying his face against Reid's neck. "Just going to lay here. Please don't stop. Mind blown. Back soon."  
  
Reid rocked his hips and Langly purred warmly against his neck. Taking it as a sign of encouragement, he kept going, listening to Langly's breathing turn to panting as he ground upward, both hands on Langly's hips. But, Langly wasn't usually this quiet, by this point. "You okay?"  
  
"Mmm." Langly nodded, still panting in time with Reid's thrusts. "'S good. More."  
  
It didn't take much longer, but by the time Reid came, Langly had fallen asleep on his chest. Reid supposed he deserved that, after the time _he'd_ fallen asleep. He tried to move Langly's hair away from both their faces and pull the blanket back up. Concerned though he was, he could admit it had been a long day, and a longer day for Langly. He could hardly blame anyone for passing out after the orgasm he'd just watched Langly have, especially under the circumstances.  
  
Of course, the problem remained that Reid wasn't tired. He stared at the ceiling and sighed, letting the last dataset he and Byers had been working on come back to him. He could see the pages; he knew the words. Maybe he'd notice something they'd missed, the other day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A chapter with zero copyediting. I'll fix this when I have a minute, but that minute is not right now.


	22. The Sixth Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things to be aware of, going into this one:  
> \- [talk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_\(Unix\)) is a split-screen, real-time text chat program, and I have done my best to render a conversation, here, in the order in which it occurred, rather than the manner in which it would have appeared to the people having it. Mostly because that would've been fucking incomprehensible.  
> \- [^H](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#%5EH) is the control code for backspace,and appears when backspace is used in terminals that only have delete mapped.

Langly woke to the feeling of something tugging at his hair. The bed seemed lumpy. Smelled like Reid-- _Reid_. Oh, _shit_. He wasn't sure there were enough apologies in the world for what he was pretty sure just happened. On the other hand, he was asleep _on_ Reid, which at least said he hadn't been shoved aside in frustration. He wasn't sure if that was better or worse.  
  
"What're you doing to my hair?" he asked, because it was a better question than 'did I just fall asleep while we were fucking'.  
  
"Oh, hey, you're awake. I was starting to worry I'd rendered you comatose. Didn't want to have to explain that to Byers," Reid teased, not answering the question, even as his fingers continued to work on Langly's hair.  
  
"Ha. Oh, ha ha." Langly held off a groan at the very idea of Byers hearing about this, ever. "Seriously. My hair."  
  
"Quipu," Reid admitted, after a moment's awkward silence.  
  
Langly's entire body went still. "Oh my god." he groaned. "My _hair_! You tied knots. In my hair."  
  
"It'll come right out," Reid promised. "I just couldn't reach anything to take notes with, and I didn't want to wake you. And then I realised I could just take notes in your hair. I'll undo them as I transcribe them. Just let me finish this thought, before I lose it."  
  
Langly felt the pull against his scalp, as Reid worked in the last few knots. "On one hand, it's really hot that you know how to do this. Like, unbelievably, incredibly hot. On the other hand, there are probably hundreds of tiny knots in my hair. On the other other hand, I'm pretty sure I just passed out while we were fucking, so I probably had this coming."  
  
"Well, you definitely had _me_ coming, but I'm not sure you were still awake for that," Reid quipped, his hands finally leaving Langly's hair. "You told me to keep going, but... I missed the part where you fell asleep. There were only about two minutes it could've happened in. I'm..." He trailed off.  
  
Langly unfolded himself just enough to see Reid's face. "I told you to keep going. I remember that. And I meant it." A thin smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Now you know how I felt, last week."  
  
Reid squeezed his eyes shut with a nervous laugh. "One of these days, we're going to get this right, and it'll be incredible." His eyes shot open. "I mean, it's already incredible, but... technical difficulties. I fell asleep, you fell asleep, we ran out of condoms, serial chair accidents, at least a handful of shower accidents even if those are clustered..."  
  
"Good ideas, bad execution. But, at least it's always fun. Except that one--"  
  
"And the other one. Same day. I'll count it as the same incident. And that was fun, anyway. Most of it." Reid smiled mischievously, hands tracing Langly's sides. "I especially liked the part when you--"  
  
The sentence was interrupted by a knock at the bedroom door. "Are the two of you awake?"  
  
"What the hell do you want, Byers?" Langly glared over his shoulder at the door.  
  
"The Black Queen wants to talk to Dr Reid."  
  
"Get up, get up!" Reid hissed, patting Langly's side. He raised his voice for Byers. "Tell her I'll be right there!"  
  
Langly leaned over the side of the bed, grabbed his bathrobe, and pressed it against Reid's chest, as he stood and staggered back. "Go. I'll be there as soon as I can find pants."  
  
"They're on the table," Reid said, as he rolled out of bed and pulled the bathrobe on. A very light material, he noticed, pulling it closed and tying it. By the time he got to the door, Langly was halfway into his jeans and still wearing the shirt with the very large and obvious stain on it.  
  
Langly caught up with Reid in the hall, and they made it up to the front, together. Byers got out of Langly's chair, which had been pushed down to the other arm of the desk, where the isolated laptop stood open.  
  
"What's going on?" Reid asked, and Byers shrugged.  
  
"I didn't ask. She asked for you, so I said I'd see if you were awake." Byers stepped back. "I'm going to go make food. Fried eggs and hash browns?"  
  
"I'd eat it," Langly answered, only half paying attention to Byers as Reid sat down. Leaning over Reid's shoulder, he pointed at the window Byers had been using. "Here's what you need to know: you type up here, her messages show up down here. She can see what you're typing as you type, so make sure you know what you're saying before you start."  
  
"Are you kidding me?"  
  
"Nah, it's just like talking. Which is why it's called 'talk'. And you're lucky it's talk and not write, because like hell am I walking you through write etiquette in two minutes or less."  
  
Reid put his hands on the unfamiliar keyboard.  
  
_Garcia?_  
  
_You surviving out there in the silicon wilds, far from the home you love?_  
  
_It's been a fascinating experience, from an anthropological standpoint. And I'm not delivering the next line of that, even if I could sing it all the way through._  
  
_Denial's not just a river in Egypt. How's Frank?_  
  
_I've since discovered that Frank has a great big_  
  
Langly started laughing.  
  
_REID!_  
  
_house, Garcia. A great big house. This place is even bigger than I thought. He's also laughing hysterically on the floor, behind me. I just heard him hit the ground._  
  
_You are just terrible, sometimes. But, what I called to tell you is that as of tomorrow, your apartment will no longer be a crime scene. We're just going to get a cleaning crew in, for you, be_  
  
_NO._  
  
_Well, there's still blood on the floor and fingerpr_  
  
Reid's hands started to shake.  
  
_NO. No more people in my aparrrtm^H^H^H_  
  
"What? Langly--"  
  
Langly pulled himself back up to kneeling and looked over Reid's elbow. "Delete, not backspace."  
  
When Reid looked back at the screen, Garcia had said the same thing.  
  
_No more people in my apartment. And the carpets are antiques. And so are the books. No. I'll clean it myself. I just want to go home._  
  
_Well, the blood is yours, so the biohazard arguments are out. The semen_  
  
_Can we not talk about this?_  
  
_isn't on rec Sorry. We're pretty sure anything that might be a biohazard came from you or someone you know. But, it's not pretty._  
  
_It's a crime scene. I know what crime scenes look like. I just want to go home. Wear my own clothes. Drink my own coffee. Erase all my messages without listening to th^H^H^H^H_  
  
_RUDE. >:( ... You should do it. If anybody asks, tell them we did it accidentally._  
  
_Maybe. A selection of messages might conveniently disappear. Is there anything else I need to know? Not to be rude, but Fitz is frying eggs and I can smell it_  
  
_He cooks?_  
  
_Well, yeah._  
  
_He's gotta be single, right? He's supposed to be dead._  
  
_GARCIA!_  
  
_He's cute! He's so adorably smart! Super smart in a cute way!_  
  
_It's... complicated._  
  
_He's gay._  
  
_No! I'm ^H^HThis is not a conversation I'm having. I'm going to tell him you want to talk to him after breakfast. Whatever conclusions the two of you come to, that's fine and none of my business, but you should be aware the inner walls aren't soundproofed here._  
  
_Neither is your apartment, according to the neighbors. There are things I never needed to know about you, my dear_  
  
_And that's why you can have that conversation with Fitz yourself. I'm going to go to breakfast before this gets any more awkward._  
  
"She has a crush on _Byers_?"  
  
Reid had almost forgotten Langly was kneeling by his elbow. "Since the day I went to get sandwiches." He blinked as he looked down. "Oh. I need to transcribe your hair."  
  
"Please. It feels weird."  
  
"After breakfast? I'm sure Byers types faster than I do." Reid reached over himself to run his thumb down Langly's cheek.  
  
"I'm pretty sure Byers also can't read it," Langly pointed out, turning his face into Reid's hand.  
  
"He doesn't have to read it. I have to read it. He just has to type it." Reid offered a lopsided smile and a slow, shallow shrug. "Besides, it's his project I was working on. The messages from Alcea. I was looking at what the words told us about the writer."  
  
"Working on a project for Byers, while you have your dick up my ass." Langly looked entirely unimpressed, until his lips slid one way and his other eyebrow went up. "Yeah, that sounds like us."  
  
"You know, I'd have been working on something much more enjoyable, if you'd been awake," Reid teased. "Maybe after breakfast, we should try again. I mean, after I pass on the notes to Byers and finish untying your hair."

* * *

"Somehow, I thought this would be easier," Reid remarked, finally properly dressed, both hands covered in oil and one holding a dental pick, as he knelt at the head of Langly's folded out vibe chair, undoing the knots, after he read off each strand to Byers.  
  
"Multiple strands without proper twisting," Byers pointed out, hands on the other keyboard until Reid worked his way up to the top and moved on. "This was inevitable."  
  
"Ow!" Langly tried very hard not to move as Reid worked the knots out. He absently wondered how much of his hair was going to end up on the floor. "So, what do you think, _Fitz_? Are you going to quit mooning and move on? Upgrade your federal heartthrob to a more compatible model?"  
  
"She's a very attractive woman. Smart, like _you're_ smart. She reminds me a lot of you, but if you were a pretty girl. Mini-dress aside."  
  
"We're not talking about the mini-dress. I could go the rest of my life without ever discussing it again," Langly huffed, tipping his head back further.  
  
"But, she's pretty young. I'm not sure how I feel about that."  
  
Reid cleared his throat. "Older than me."  
  
The room fell silent for a long moment, until Langly ventured another argument.  
  
"She's halfway to a pension, Byers, she's not that young."  
  
"Maybe not for _you_!" Byers's fingers clattered quietly on the keyboard, as Langly tried and failed to throw himself upright, a thousand things better unsaid on the tip of his tongue.  
  
"Top of the next strand!" Reid raised his voice just enough to be heard, even if Langly had laid into Byers in the middle of the sentence.  
  
Byers turned his chair, putting his hands on the other keyboard. "Go."  
  
Reid closed his eyes and read the strand with his fingers. "Word choice throughout, but specifically in the fifth document, is bureaucratic. This is a person who works in the administrative sector, but there are hints in two and four of a military-adjacent background -- parent, friend, sibling, partner. The words are there, but the usage isn't quite consistent with personal familiarity."  
  
"I still can't believe you fit all that in something smaller than a pencil braid," Langly muttered, as Reid started taking the knots out.  
  
"I didn't. It's shorthand. I just had to put enough that I could remember what I was thinking, later." Reid kept his eyes on his hands, the knots coming apart more easily, this time. "Five codex codex person two four codex warrior codex yes no warrior no."  
  
Langly blinked at the ceiling. " _Seriously_?"  
  
"The most information in the least amount of space. I already have the context I need to interpret it." Reid worked oil into a knot, waited, and slipped it with the pick. "Have we gotten to pained smiles from Garcia, yet? I'm assuming you told her what's happening."  
  
"I just said you were translating something for me, so there would be pauses in the conversation." Byers glanced over his shoulder. "Why, is this something she'd expect from you?"  
  
"Yes." Reid laughed. "Maybe not exactly this, but I can see the look on her face already. This is definitely within expected parameters, for me."  
  
"If you add the part where we were both naked, does it get any more unexpected?" Langly drawled.  
  
"Please don't add the part where we were naked. I can't even begin to express how uncomfortable I am with the idea of anyone I work with even remembering that I take my clothes off for any reason." Reid's shoulders pulled in as he got near the top of the strand. "Some of them may have seen me in various states of undress, under extraordinary circumstances, but we all try not to think about that."  
  
"She's a little surprised. She'd also like to make sure we've been taking care of you, and you're eating and sleeping." Byers glanced at Reid again. "She's how much older than you?"  
  
"Four and a half years." Reid finished the strand and moved on.  
  
Langly cleared his throat at Byers, with the most pointed look he could deliver, sideways.  
  
"Five." Byers pointed at Langly.  
  
"January," Langly retorted.  
  
"Top of the next strand!" Reid suddenly changed the subject, before they could get any further down that rabbithole.  
  
"Go."  
  
"You want to talk about young, your _writer_ is young. Phrasing is consistent with someone in their late teens or early twenties, and given the other points, thus far, I'd edge that toward early twenties. We're looking for someone who is working in an environment in which formality is important, and who can't quite shake it when writing to unknowns -- like you. I'm going to assume they don't consider you a friend, but a semi-professional contact. Slightly less formal than work, but not inside the circle for fully informal communication."  
  
"The business casual of language," Langly guessed.  
  
Reid tipped his head, blinked, and then nodded. "Basically, yeah."  
  
Two more hours passed, with Reid undoing his work and Byers intermittently chatting with Garcia. By the time the transcription was finished, Langly's hair was half oiled, hanging in lank, serpentine locks.  
  
"And that's the last knot." Reid sat back and examined his work, knees aching from the metal floor.  
  
"Brush. Now." Langly held out his hand, expectantly, and Byers delivered, before Reid could make it to his feet.  
  
As Langly sat forward, folding the chair, Byers gestured for Reid to pull over Frohike's chair and sit. The chair was, of course, much too short, and Reid stretched his legs awkwardly as he waited for the pain in his knees to subside.  
  
"So, we most likely have a young woman, with a military influence in her personal life, working as a receptionist, secretary, or file clerk in an extremely formal environment -- probably legal or government offices." Byers looked down the notes. "And she's sending us information, but not primary documents, which means -- assuming the information is good -- that she's heard about it, but either hasn't seen the actual documentation or is unable to safely produce copies of it. Next question: Of all the people in the world a young whistleblower could contact, why us? We're a little more popular with the thirty plus demographic at that end, and popularity goes up with age, because we kept a lot of our online readers when we switched, and they're not that young any more. Who is this kid?"  
  
"Probably not the child of one of your readers. Children tend to rebel against their parents -- I mean, look at me. I love my mother, but I didn't follow her into English literature," Reid pointed out.  
  
"You also didn't follow her into the nuthouse, for which we're all grateful, no offence to your mother," Langly threw in, and Byers kicked his chair.  
  
"You can't just say things like that, Langly!"  
  
"The hell I can't!" Langly let go of the brush for an emphatic gesture, and it stayed lodged in his hair. He carefully plucked it out and looked around the back of the chair at Reid. "Look, you're nuts, and I like you that way. It's like Frohike said -- and Byers if you ever tell him I agreed with him I will push you down the basement stairs -- you'd have to be to go to bed with me. I'm not the most reasonable person in the world."  
  
"The local definition of 'crazy' does not even begin to scratch the surface," Reid replied, face impossibly expressionless, as he grabbed the back of Langly's chair and slammed his foot into the middle of it hard enough to pop the latch and fold it back. "Jokes about my mother are off the table."  
  
Langly swallowed hard, staring up at Reid, eyes wide. "Jokes about your mother are off the table," he agreed, quietly, wondering if that was it, if this had been the last straw.  
  
Reid let go of the chair and leaned back, lips tight, looking pale and stunned at his own actions. He almost felt like he should apologise, but decided against it. He'd say something later, when he was more sure of the words that would come out of his mouth.  
  
Byers changed the subject. "Maybe a niece? A girl who grew up reading her cool uncle's back issues?"  
  
"I could see it." Reid's voice came out weak. "What about friends you left behind? This could be the next generation of a family that actually knew you, where it's not just politics, it's history. You don't exist any more, but your new publication makes blatant reference to the old one. It could be someone who's looking for a connection they can trust, and a friend of a friend is more appealing than some faceless journalist they have no relation to."  
  
"Shit," Langly sighed, not even bothering to tip the chair up. "Look up Jimmy."  
  
"Jimmy was good people, but he was about as bright as a box of rocks." Frohike said, as he came up the hall. "Get the fed out of my chair, and I'll go grab yours."  
  
"Forget the chair, Special Agent Sexy can sit in my lap," Langly ventured, testing to see just how much he'd pissed Reid off. Sure, Reid was going to end up getting the chair anyway, but the response, here, would tell him exactly how badly he'd fucked up.  
  
Reid looked like he might object, like he might demand Langly's desk chair. Instead, he got up, moved Frohike's chair back to Frohike's side of the desk, shoved the vibe chair back a couple of feet, with his foot, and dropped into Langly's lap, leaning on one arm, legs tossed over the other. "Who else did you know who might have had children?"  
  
Langly carefully sat up, not to drop Reid when the chair folded, and put his arms around Reid, awkwardly. This was definitely not the answer he'd expected, but he'd take it. Gladly. "Yves? We know Kimmy didn't, Jimmy's dead--"  
  
"Scully." Frohike dropped into his chair and punched a monitor on, filling in numbers and materials from a pad he tossed onto the desk.  
  
"She did have children," Byers said, after a moment. "But, she also didn't think much of us. And she gave up her son for adoption, didn't she? So, that puts him out of the range we're looking at."  
  
"Jimmy and Yves are actually likely." Langly pulled Reid a little closer. "Not together. Oh god, if they're together, nobody tell me."  
  
"It's pretty possible that I'm wrong," Reid admitted. "This early on, with what little information we have, it's kind of hard to pass judgement on how this person would have found you. I'm just working from the fact that Byers mentioned your general demographic being well past thirty. If we're looking at someone who's probably seventeen to twenty-two, where did they come from? Especially with the kind of information they're passing on."  
  
"New theory." Byers leaned back and put his feet on the desk, hands folded in his lap. "Alcea isn't the source of the information. Her parent is. That's why we have no primary documents."  
  
"Oh." Langly blinked a few times.  
  
"It's possible, and that would push the age down. Not toning down the formality for the conversation, but attempting to bring it up." Reid nodded, thoughtfully.  
  
"Does this mean you just tied knots in my hair for nothing?" Langly bounced his knee under Reid.  
  
"No, of course not. I tied knots in your hair because you don't keep a pen and paper next to the bed."


	23. Chapter 23

"So, Byers, you've got a date?" Frohike raised his eyebrows, as Byers came through the kitchen and swiped a seasoned fry from the bowl Frohike had just poured them into.  
  
"It's not a--" Byers stopped, looked at the thick slice of potato he held, ate it, and tried again. "Yes. I have a date. With a kind, sensible, intelligent woman."  
  
" _Young_ woman." Frohike teased.  
  
"Stop that!" Langly threw a ball of paper at Frohike's head, from where he and Reid were sorting through Byers's printouts of Alcea's messages and pinning locations on the map on the other side of the room.  
  
"For the third time, she is older than _me_." Reid did not look amused. "And occasionally smarter."  
  
"Differently smart," Langly argued.  
  
"She has the common sense we both lack."  
  
"Smarter than both of us." Langly nodded, then turned his eyes back to Byers. "Do it, Byers. It's a good time to be alive. And, yeah, she went over, but I can't really hold it against her. I'd have gone over for an equipment budget like that, in my twenties."  
  
"I'd like to _stay_ alive." Byers swiped another fry.  
  
"Then make sure you pick the meeting spot, and go in with audio and video. And don't say anything about location over a channel you're not sure is secure." Frohike shrugged, dipping more potatoes and tossing them into the pan. "Of course, you were probably already talking to her on the isolated line, so anything you said passed through the Bureau network."  
  
"I haven't picked where, yet," Byers admitted, still looking at his hands. "I didn't even remember to ask what she likes."  
  
"Chocolate cake," Reid suggested, with a faint smile. "She's a vegetarian and she likes exciting coffee and good chocolate cake. Plan accordingly."  
  
"Thank you." Byers just kept looking down, as if trying to solve some greater problem.  
  
Langly wadded up another ball of paper and nailed Byers in the top of the head with it. "Earth to Byers. Hot date? Pretty girl? You look like someone just died."  
  
"It's Susanne, isn't it?" Frohike turned off the stove and dumped the last of the fries into the bowl.  
  
"I fell in love with her the day we met. How could I not? She's why we're here." Byers finally sat, pushing himself up onto the corner of the kitchen island, but still staring at the floor. "For almost thirty years, I haven't even considered anyone else. Not seriously. Not for more than five minutes.  
  
"And you haven't even seen her or heard from her in twenty of those years. If she's looking, she thinks you're dead," Langly reminded him. "She's supposed to think you're dead."  
  
"She's dead, too!" Byers didn't look up, but his voice turned strident. "I could've done better. I could've kept track of her, all these years, even if I didn't go with her. At least I'd know..."  
  
Langly's lips thinned. He looked at Reid, then back at Byers, and said nothing about what he'd found. "I'm sure she's still alive, somewhere. We gave her a good start, but if she was at all smart, she'd have dropped that identity and picked up a new one, somewhere that would never be connected with her. She disappeared, because she had to, and you know that, because you helped me set it up."  
  
"And now, Langly's right. We're dead, too. We don't exist any more. There's no way for us to find her, and there's no way for her to find us." Frohike shook his head. "I think it's over, Byers. You might as well go out with this girl. She sounds sweet."  
  
"If you're not sure, don't do this," Reid said, quietly. "I don't want to see you get hurt, and I really don't want to see her get hurt. Again. But, she really is very sweet and very smart, and from what I've seen, I really do think you'd get along."  
  
"It's one date, Byers. Worst case, she gets some sense and decides you're exactly as boring as you really are." Langly shrugged and jammed another pin into the map. "Of all of us, _you're_ not going to get shot in the street. Look at that face. It's forgettable. Which is why you do all the things that involve people having to see one of us. Nobody looks twice at you, these days, except the Black Queen, and I think you'd be an idiot not to get in on that for the half an hour it takes her to realise you're about as exciting as a cultural treatise on middle America."  
  
"I think that may be part of the appeal," Reid admitted. "Smart, but relatively normal. You're not an utter weirdo, like Langly."  
  
Langly's back straightened and his shoulders squared. "I am--!" His head tipped to the side, and then he nodded. "Probably an utter weirdo. That's fair."  
  
"You know, I can't get away with telling him that." Frohike leaned on the kitchen island, eating fries.  
  
" _You're_ an asshole about it," Langly pointed out, and then gestured at Reid with a pin. " _He_ likes it."  
  
Reid nodded subtly. "But, the point is, I've been listening to her talk about men for almost as long as you've lived here. I think this could work, but I really think you need to be honest with her. If you're still waiting for Susanne, you need to tell her that."  
  
" _Getting over_ Susanne," Frohike suggested. "He's getting over his ex."  
  
"His long-term obsession," Langly scoffed. "She's not even an ex. There was no relationship, there. We met her _twice_. Ten years apart. Was that even a one-night stand?"  
  
"That's none of your business." Byers looked Langly right in the eye.  
  
"Byers." Langly stared back, one eyebrow slowly creeping up.  
  
Byers looked away. "Yes."  
  
Langly looked horrified. " _When_? Was I in the room for that?"  
  
"You remember when Frohike went to get something to take the photo against, and we all disappeared for a while?" Byers cleared his throat and tipped his head.  
  
"You sly dog." Frohike sounded impressed. "I know I gave you a hard time about it, but I never thought you'd actually do it! Good for you."  
  
"And you still came back to us." Langly looked at Reid. "How many times have I called you crazy, this week? I take them all back. What the _hell_ were you thinking, Byers?"  
  
"I was thinking it was goodbye." Byers shrugged, eyes on the floor again. "I was thinking we'd never be together, but we'd always have Vegas."  
  
"He's the normal one?" Langly demanded, pointing at Byers. He let his arm drop. "I'm glad you came with us, instead of going with her. Did I tell you that? I think I told you that. But, you're still out of your formerly-federal mind."  
  
"Nutty as a fruitcake," Frohike agreed, "but who in this room isn't?"  
  
"According to Langly's newly revised opinion, _me_." Reid's face conveyed everything that needed to be said about his opinion on that subject, but he voiced it anyway. "Because that's _exactly_ why I'm here, instead of by myself in a very nice hotel, like a reasonable person."  
  
"Obviously, you're nuts. You're sleeping with _him_. You're delusional, at least." Frohike threw the paper ball back at Langly. "There's no way he's worth all the noise."  
  
Reid's face went still, wholly blank, as he stared across the kitchen at Frohike. "You have a lot of opinions on something you'll never know, firsthand."  
  
Langly put an arm around Reid's shoulders, awkwardly. "He's right, but we're not here to talk about my sex life. We're here to talk about Byers's sex life. As in, the one he could be having, if he'd just put down the torch."  
  
"And now who's having opinions about something they know nothing about?" Byers finally looked up, again. "You have no idea what this is like!"  
  
"You're right! I don't! I never did!" Langly threw his other arm out, nearly pulling Reid off balance. "I know that you're obsessed with her, and you'd chase her to the ends of the earth, despite the fact she almost got us killed! Twice! I know you wanted to be with her, and for some reason, you gave that up! You _had_ that chance, Byers, and you didn't take it. And I know you weren't happy about it. And I spent days trying to make you feel better. But, I have never once claimed to understand what the hell you were thinking."  
  
"I was thinking that I didn't want to go into hiding, because we had too much work to do. I was thinking that I knew you both, I liked you, and I didn't want to leave. I was thinking that I adored her, and she wanted to marry me, but we didn't actually know each other at all, and just maybe the right way to start a relationship wasn't a shotgun wedding, a fake identity, and being trapped together, because neither of us existed any more. I was thinking we both deserved something better and more stable than we could have, right then. I wanted to do the right thing."  
  
"I just want you to remember that you wanting to 'do the right thing' is how I wound up swallowing a pint of gasoline," Langly huffed.  
  
"Look, Byers, we're in a better place, now. You can probably get away with living the dream. I just don't think it's going to be with Susanne," Frohike said, quietly. "You go on one date. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But, you'll know."  
  
"I don't know if I can live with the guilt." Byers pushed himself off the kitchen island and walked out, in the direction of the back.  
  
"Byers!" Langly called after him, and Reid shook his head.  
  
"You don't understand, but I do." Reid looked at Langly. "And the difference between where he is and where I am is about three litres of blood and a bullet."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter, but I didn't want to bury the last line.
> 
> And I just want to take a moment to thank all approximately fifteen regular readers of this extended idiocy.


	24. Chapter 24

Langly sat next to Frohike, tablet in his hands, flipping through specs for construction materials. Not for the first time, he wondered what Reid and Byers were talking about, shut in Byers's room, where there was no audio. Hours had gone by, since Reid had gone back with a pot of tea and three packets of the freeze-dried fruit mix Byers liked, so obviously, Byers had at least opened the door. What the hell would Byers talk to _Reid_ about that he wouldn't talk to... well, Frohike, if Langly was completely honest with himself. Byers wasn't going to tell _him_ shit.  
  
"Go for the EMD rubber, in my room?" Langly proposed, finally remembering the question he was supposed to be answering. "It's good against noise and I need to drop the static in there if I'm going to go to wireless testing on the suits. Floor should be enough. It's not what I want to look at on my walls."  
  
"Rubber, not resin?" Frohike tipped his chair back, looking curiously at Langly.  
  
Langly shook his head. "Noise. Resin's going to reflect the sound even worse than the concrete."  
  
"They've got carpet, now," Frohike pointed out.  
  
"I don't want fucking carpet. I hate fucking carpet," Langly huffed.  
  
"Buy your boyfriend a nice rug, if you go with the rubber. As long as you don't step on it, you'll be fine, but normal people don't want to put their feet on cold rubber when they get out of bed," Frohike pointed out. "Besides, he's got wood floors, and it looks like every inch is covered in rugs."  
  
"When did you see--"  
  
"Crime scene photos."  
  
"Right." Langly nodded, somehow relieved, totally ignoring the 'boyfriend' thing. He knew Frohike was trying to get under his skin, and he just wasn't in the mood. "Did you see that couch? The one that maybe a gerbil could fit on in anything but a sitting position? He sleeps on that couch. I'm still trying to work out what kind of timelord bullshit that is. It's bigger when you're laying on it?"  
  
"He really doesn't take up that much space." Frohike pointed to the diagram on the screen, again. "But, trust me. Buy a nice rug. Even just a runner, so you don't have to step on it, but it's there if he wants it."  
  
"I want a new bed frame, too. We could probably build it, but I feel like there's nothing lost in paying someone else to do it for me, at this point." Langly shrugged, tablet in one hand. "Loft-style canopy with some dim LEDs around the edge. Just a bit of a glow so the room's not pitch black, any more."  
  
"That's the boyfriend talking." Frohike nodded sagely. "I know you and your pitch black cave. You sleep in the dark."  
  
"I get headaches," Langly muttered, still refusing to let Frohike get to him. "Fine, we'll put a switch on it. I just need enough light so he doesn't trip on anything in the middle of the night. It's not going to be that bright."  
  
"You should consider a new mattress. You've had that one since we moved in."  
  
"And I'm finally used to the stupid thing!" Langly snapped. "Talk to me about walls."  
  
"You can afford to lose two feet in either direction, right?" Frohike asked, switching back to a three-dimensional view and turning the diagram. "Not going to clip any major projects?"  
  
"Still going to be bigger than Reid's apartment." Langly snorted and rolled his eyes. "Seriously, though. I'm pretty sure I have more space in the room I sleep in than he lives in."  
  
"He doesn't take up much space," Frohike said, again, meaning something a little different, this time. "If you can afford the space, Byers wants to go six inch baffles with gaps on either side, and then wallboard and plaster, and we can hit it with anti-static paint, if you're worried about the tests."  
  
"Do it. Everything should still fit where it is, even if we have to move the bathroom wall to get the bath back in." Langly leaned back in Byers's chair, feet stretched under the desk, and shoved his glasses up with one hand to rub his eyes. "That shit's gloss, right? Gloss in a nice medium grey-blue. Easy on the eyes and easy to get the spots off it."  
  
"You know, you could probably go darker, since it's a gloss. It's still going to bounce light," Frohike pointed out.  
  
"I--" Langly started a sentence about being considerate, before he remembered Reid's walls were olive green. "Hm. Midnight blue or jetlag violet? I'm not doing black. I don't need that kind of contrast when I punch the lights up."  
  
"You actually asking me, or was that a rhetorical question?"  
  
"I'm actually asking."  
  
"Midnight blue. You remember the last time you and jetlag violet had an extended relationship?"  
  
"I've never--" Langly paused, blinking. "Oh god, you mean the two days in West Palm Beach?"  
  
"The reason it's called jetlag violet? _Yeah_."  
  
"In my defence, I was jetlagged at the time, after that no-expenses paid trip to Puerto Vallarta."  
  
"Langly, you threw up for like thirty hours, and blamed it on the curtains. We thought you were going to die."  
  
"I spent like eighteen fucking hours in the belly of a cargo plane! Because _one_ of you idiots forgot to check what time zone the flight information came from!" Langly jabbed a finger at Frohike, letting his glasses drop, lopsided. "And I swore that would be the last time, because that was _your_ end of things, Frohike. _You're_ the one of us who did most of the sneaking into places, because _you_ were actually good at it. I belong behind a screen. In front of a camera, at the worst. I do not belong _in a goddamn cargo hold_. You should've been on that plane, _not me_. And you know what? I wouldn't have screwed up the time zones, either."  
  
"I can't believe you're still mad about that. What was that, ninety-six?"  
  
"Ninety-four. And I'll die mad, thanks." Langly straightened his glasses. "Midnight blue, so I don't want to punch you in the dick every time I turn on a light."  
  
A message popped up in another window, and Frohike brought it to the fore. "Byers can hear you yelling."  
  
"Byers _should_ hear me yelling, because I'm still pissed at him, too!" Langly shouted, tipping his head back to miss the wall.  
  
"Are you done?"  
  
"Maybe."

* * *

  
Reid blinked at the wall a few times. "I couldn't make out enough words. What's he yelling about?"  
  
"Ninety-four, rumours of organ harvesting and kidneys being shipped to a clinic in Mexico, along with standard medical supplies. It checked out, up to that point. The police in West Palm Beach had been working on it and everything, and then they suddenly dropped it and we couldn't figure out why. Turned out some official so-and-so, and I can't remember who, was applying pressure from above. So, we figured out when the next shipment was supposedly going to happen, but Frohike was allergic to ... something, probably in the motel room, looking back, but we couldn't send him in sneezing. So, Langly had to go, because neither of them was going to let me do it." Byers shrugged, expressively. "And then I didn't realise the flight times Langly had pulled up were all stored in the database as GMT, so I thought he had plenty of time, and he hadn't taken the time to read them, once Frohike started sneezing again... And suddenly, he got locked into the cargo bay and the plane took off. He went out of range so fast... You don't really think about how fast an aircraft accelerates, until you lose contact with someone in the middle of takeoff."  
  
"You know, to be entirely fair, I'd probably still be pissed, too," Reid admitted, nibbling at a freeze-dried slice of peach.  
  
"I can hardly blame him," Byers agreed, picking up the teapot before realising it was empty and reaching for another strawberry instead. "I-- Look, this is awkward, and probably not my business, but I'm going to ask, because he's my friend, and I care."  
  
"No, I haven't managed to elbow him in the face, in the middle of the night," Reid quipped, stretching his fingers and resisting the urge to scratch at his still-bandaged arms.  
  
Byers laughed, surprised. "I appreciate that, but it's not what I was going to ask. You're still in love with someone else. How do you manage?"  
  
"No, I think at this point, that is your business, because I know why you're asking, and I'm honestly surprised you didn't ask sooner." Reid tucked his feet under himself on Byers's sofa. "I don't think there will be a day in my life when I don't love her, when I don't miss her. But, I-- I didn't just see her buried. I watched her die. I offered to die for her. I know she's never coming back. And the guilt is still crushing, sometimes. But, I have to believe that loving her is enough, because it's all that I have. It's all I'll ever have, now. And I keep telling myself I'm allowed to be happy." He took a slow, deep breath, covering his eyes with one hand, and swallowed a few times, before he tried to go on. It wasn't quite enough. His voice still cracked. "I remember that she could hear when I was happy, that she liked the sound of my voice when things were good. I keep telling myself the best gift I can offer, in her memory, is to just... be happy." Shifting again, he pulled his knees up, resting his forehead against his arms, on top of them. "And I sound exactly like every cheating husband I have ever interviewed, but the difference is that the love of my life is dead. My own near-death experiences aside, I'm pretty sure she doesn't have an opinion, any more."  
  
Without a word, Byers slipped a napkin into Reid's hand.  
  
"Thank you."  
  
"So, the answer to 'how do you manage' is you don't."  
  
"Basically." Reid kept his head down, but blotted his eyes and blew his nose. "People say it gets better. And I know they're right. I didn't leave my house for almost a month. Stopped shaving. Barely ate. And now I'm..." He gestured with the arm his head was still resting against. "I don't know. I have no idea what I'm doing. This ranks among the most blatantly reckless, poorly-planned, probably actually stupid things I've done, and I've done some stupid things in my life. But, I honestly like him. I like the way he thinks. I feel good when he smiles. He makes me happy, and I really want to believe we can at least be friends, even if this doesn't work the way we want it to."  
  
"You know he's going to be a complete prick about that, right?" Byers swallowed an exasperated chuckle. "He'll be so horrified and embarrassed, he'll try to give you a reason to never talk to him again, so he can say he did it on purpose, and I really hope you don't let him get away with it."  
  
"I will rip his ass off like the hand of god," Reid firmly announced to his knees. "Just in case there was any question about how I might take that kind of behaviour." He raised just his eyes above his arm and rolled them toward Byers.  
  
"The two of you are too much alike, in some ways." Byers shook his head, amused. "Bullheaded, driven, and proud."  
  
Reid shook his head. "Dirty secret? That's not 'proud'. It's 'defensive'."  
  
"On him?"  
  
Reid tipped his head back and forth. "Yes." A pause, and then, more muffled, "Plus one."  
  
Byers changed the subject. "You really think I should tell her? Right up front?"  
  
Reid finally picked his head up to look at Byers. "She deserves to know that when you start questioning yourself, it's not about her. And you should probably tell her early. I feel like it's the kind of thing that should probably be on the table before you sleep with someone, at the very least, and having completely failed in that regard, I'm definitely in a position to say that."  
  
"When did you tell him?" Byers asked.  
  
"Pretty much right before we got shot at, actually." Reid pressed his face against his knees and laughed, embarrassed. "I can't really imagine there having been a worse time to mention that. 'Oh, yeah, the last person I actively wanted to kiss got shot to death.' Was it even four hours later, suddenly somebody's shooting at us?"  
  
"You know he already knew, right?"  
  
"Some of it. I don't know what's in the official report. I never read it, and I don't really want to."  
  
"I don't blame you." Byers turned a fragment of peach in his fingers. "How did you bring it up? I mean, it ... seems like an awkward subject."  
  
"I was exhausted and I panicked. And he just stayed there and talked me through it, like he knew exactly what he was doing--"  
  
"He does." Byers cleared his throat.  
  
"The nightmares were yours," Reid realised, turning his head to look at Byers across his knees.  
  
"Probably, if he was talking about someone else's. I had terrible dreams, for years. Not frightening, just depressing." Byers shook his head. "Are you sure he wasn't talking about _his_ nightmares?"  
  
"I got the impression he meant someone else's, but I was also very tired at the time."  
  
"Hell is waking up in the back of a car to the sound of one of your best friends screaming his head off, for ... months. It was months, at least." Byers shook his head. "He kept dreaming he was back in the body bag, every time he fell asleep."  
  
"My god, that's..." Reid nodded, turning his face back between his knees. "Yeah. I... yeah."  
  
"The grave?" Byers guessed.  
  
"You read that one. I hope you skipped the photos, or I am never going to be able to look you in the eye again."  
  
"Of course," Byers lied. "The text said enough that I didn't need to see." He'd actually seen the photos before he got to the text, and regretted it, instantly. The text, though, would have been sufficient, if he'd started there. But, he hadn't, and alphabetically, the close-ups of the wounds had been at the top of the list.  
  
"Thank you. Enough people saw that when it happened." Reid swallowed. "I was um... It was bad. It was bad for a lot of years. So, I get it."  
  
"I'd be impressed, but with what we went through... Impressed is for people who haven't been there, and may they never know. I'm glad you made it, though. I'm glad I get to know you."  
  
"May they never know," Reid repeated, quietly. "It's half the reason I still have my job. I got into it for the puzzles, for the opportunity to study people. I stayed because there are things no one should have to know, and it's too late for me."  
  
Byers laughed. "That's really it, isn't it? It's too late for us. There's a point where you can't just... walk away, any more."  
  
"People keep trying. They think if they leave, it'll be someone else's problem. That they'll be able to look away." Reid shook his head and finally sat back, knees still bent up. "Maybe they can. I can't."  
  
"We couldn't, either," Byers admitted. "But, I guess we didn't try that hard. In the end, we came right back here. Right back to where we started, to keep doing the same thing. Well, as best we could, considering everything. I'd say that was what saved Langly from himself."  
  
"Coming back here?" Reid picked the safer question.  
  
"There's only so long one person can be that angry. There's only so many consecutive days you can stay awake." Byers shrugged, shoulders moving with a slow, deep breath. "He's a real high scores man. Can't handle being knocked out of the top slot. So, we came back to the scene of his last defeat, and he just dug his heels in and got back to doing what he's good at. It was harder, on the road -- not getting pulled over, not getting the windows knocked on, if we stopped to sleep. Once we came back, once we had a roof over our heads again, it was easier for all of us. People might have been looking for us, but if they found us, it wouldn't be dumb luck and a busted tail light."  
  
"No, it would be someone else who knocked him out of the top slot."  
  
Byers laughed. "You know he's not convinced of that, right? She found us, but she found us to ask for his help. Mitigating circumstance."  
  
"Speaking of 'her'..." Reid finally put his feet back on the floor. "Are you going on that date?"  
  
"I think I am. I said I'd do it, and I did it so I'd have a harder time backing out, when I came to my senses." Byers looked up as the shouting started again. "Should we go make sure they don't murder each other over flooring options?"  
  
"Is _that_ what they're fighting about?" Reid blinked in amazement.  
  
"Frohike was taking measurements, earlier. They're talking materials for the renovation." Byers nodded. "He's probably going to try to move in with you while that's going on, just not to have to share the basement with both of us. There's not a lot of walls down there, as you know. He values his privacy even more than I do, which is saying something."  
  
"As long as it's in the next couple of weeks, I'd probably welcome it. I don't really want to go back, alone," Reid admitted, getting up, as Langly started yelling something about electromagnetic dispersion. "I'm not sure if we should break this up or make popcorn."  
  
Byers nodded contemplatively. "Popcorn, first."


	25. Chapter 25

  
Langly broke the popcorn-butter-flavoured kiss and licked the salt off his lips, not quite looking at Reid. "So, you're going home, tomorrow."  
  
"You're coming with me, right?" Reid asked, the hand holding the bowl of popcorn held out to one side, so he wouldn't get his greasy fingers in Langly's hair.  
  
"Well, I meant to, yeah. But, I mean..." Langly shrugged, too close to see, close enough to feel. "Is that what you want? I just... You know how you stop and think about something and all of a sudden you realise you never asked?"  
  
"It's not a problem I have. When I do something without asking, it's because I meant to."  
  
"In my line of work, you just... don't ask. It's better if nobody ever finds out." Langly chuckled nervously. "But, this isn't work, and it's... Listen, I'm not good at this. Obviously. But, something tells me I'm not supposed to just invite myself over like I belong there. If for no other reason than I don't. You know where everything goes. I'm not something you should have to find spa--"  
  
"Langly?"  
  
"Hm?" Langly blinked, round-eyed and suddenly focused.  
  
"I want you to come with me. Please." The hand Reid had on Langly's back closed, catching his shirt.  
  
"Then I'll go. No problem." Langly offered an awkward smile. "Whatever's there, we'll fix it."  
  
"Thank you." Reid rested his forehead on Langly's shoulder. "I don't want to go back there and see the damage."  
  
"But, you wouldn't let Her Majesty get the cleaners in for you..." Langly held Reid close, one hand gently stroking his spine.  
  
"That's just more damage. People ... touching things, moving things. I don't want any more hands on my things. I don't want anyone accidentally damaging something I can't replace, because they just don't ... think!"  
  
"You tell me what to do, and I'll make it happen," Langly promised. "And I'll go home, when you tell me to."  
  
"That might be a few days," Reid muttered.  
  
"Days?" Langly sounded surprised, and Reid stepped back, suddenly.  
  
"You can go whenever you want. I just... I'm not throwing you out, in the morning, this time."  
  
Langly pointed. "You should probably put the popcorn down."  
  
Reid looked down at the bowl in his hand. "You're right. I should." He set it on the nightstand. "But, I was holding it so I wouldn't wipe my greasy hand on you."  
  
"I think it's a little late for you to avoid putting your greasy hands all over me." A hint of a smile teased at the corners of Langly's mouth. "Might as well be a grease you can lick off, this time."  
  
It took Reid a moment to realise what Langly was actually saying. "I haven't-- Oh. I'm not sure that's really a good idea."  
  
"It's gotta be less of a disaster than the last bad idea I had. I really hope that comes out of the sheets..." Langly's shoulders tipped up in a tiny shrug. "And if it doesn't, I'll think of you every time I look at them."  
  
"I can't believe you managed to spill that much lube. I'd be sorry about your bathrobe, but that was completely your fault, and I was just in the middle of it." Reid laughed, slightly embarrassed.  
  
"Not worried about it. There's more lube. Remind me to pack a bottle to leave at yours. I said I was going to bring some, and then we ended up here, instead." Langly glanced around the room. "Actually, can you help me throw a bag together? I don't want to forget anything, and my past ideas of what goes in an overnight bag are... not going to be at all useful, here. I don't need the night vision goggles. I probably do need another pair of boxers."  
  
"Seriously? You don't pack--"  
  
"I don't pack much. Byers won't go anywhere without a suit bag. Frohike could clothe a battalion of midgets out of his bag. I'm lucky if I remember one change of clothes. My bag's usually filled with cables and adapters. Tools. Fucked if I remembered to pack a toothbrush, half the time." Langly blinked. "Toothbrush. I should pack that."  
  
"Toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush, razor, socks and underwear for at least three days, at _least_ one full change of clothes, a jacket, the tablet I never use, spare phone charger, a box of granola bars, and a small medical kit." Reid ticked off the items on his fingers, as he went. "That's the bag on the shelf next to the door. Everything else, I'm probably carrying anyway."  
  
"You don't pack shampoo, soap, or shaving cream." Langly spotted the holes in the list, instantly.  
  
"Even the worst places we've stayed have supplied shampoo and soap. It's not worth the risk of mine leaking in the bag. I keep my toothpaste in a ziploc, and I still won't carry liquids." Reid shrugged. "You probably do want to bring your own, since I don't have conditioner. I'd say bring your laptop, but I don't have internet."  
  
"City wireless probably reaches, and if it doesn't, I'll borrow your neighbour's." Langly dragged an old black bag out of the closet, looking a little stunned once it was in his hands.  
  
"You all right?" Reid asked, pulling a towel out from under the bed and wiping the grease off his hand.  
  
"I haven't looked at this bag in so long. I didn't use it, last time, because it didn't fit the look. Just gives me chills. I lived out of this thing, for a while." Langly shook his head to clear it, before he started tossing things into the bag. "You're really all right smelling like a hotel?"  
  
"I don't bring home into the field with me," Reid finally admitted. "And I try very hard not to bring my work home. At least not in the specifics. In the abstract, I write papers about recent observations and repeating themes, but for the most part, it all stops at the front door. Or that's where I try to leave it. Except... well... obviously..." He rubbed one elbow, absently, as it came back to him how little he remembered about that night.  
  
Langly tossed the bag on the bed, half full, and threw himself next to it, invitingly, he hoped. "Obviously."  
  
Reid stayed where he was, eyes glazed and unseeing, fingers rubbing more insistently at his elbow. "I shower when I get home. There's a different soap for things that go in the bag. I answer the phone because I _have to_. When I'm home, I want to _be home_. I want to leave everything at my desk." He finally looked up at Langly. "It doesn't work very well, but it works even less well, if I stop trying."  
  
"And then, sometimes, it follows you home anyway." Langly reached for the nightstand drawer and made the obvious additions to the bag.  
  
"I wasn't going to be lucky forever."  
  
"Your definition of 'lucky' needs some help." Langly raised his eyebrows.  
  
"Yeah, I had a psychologist tell me that, once." Reid shook his head. "I know what bad looks like. This isn't it. Every day that isn't bad is a lucky one."  
  
"That's fucked up," Langly insisted. "I've been carried off in a body bag full of vomit, mailed to Mexico, shot, electrocuted, almost drowned, and had more body cavity searches than one person needs in a lifetime, and I'll still complain about burnt toast and Frohike being an inexcusable prick. But, then, I've always been an ungrateful little shit, if you take my parents' word for it."  
  
"It's always the little things, in the end, isn't it?" Reid finally sat beside where Langly sprawled on the bed, and Langly twisted around to lay across his lap. "Running out of coffee, losing a button, getting shit on by a bird..."  
  
"Nah, I'm pretty sure I can get pissed about anything." Langly offered a small smile. "It's a gift."  
  
Reid snickered and turned his face aside. But, what Byers had said earlier came back to him: 'there's only so long one person can be that angry'. "I don't know. You're surprisingly laid back, when you're not talking to Frohike."  
  
"Frohike gets what he has coming to him, because he's doing it on purpose, just like he has been for thirty years," Langly huffed, rolling his eyes and jabbing a finger at Reid. "He's an asshole. I like him anyway. Obviously, I like you better."  
  
"You haven't been putting up with me for thirty years," Reid teased, winding his fingers in Langly's hair.  
  
"I liked you better in the first four hours I knew you. Do you know how I met Frohike? I met him when he shorted out one of my converters with a re-wired palm buzzer in the middle of a demo. _My_ demo." Langly folded his arms and crossed his ankles. "He had the whole thing planned out, too. I punched him right in the eye, and he sold like fifteen units off that bruise. Me? I got nothing. Nobody would buy, after that. Last time he touched my hardware, though."  
  
"Didn't he say something about a fire...?" Reid raised an eyebrow.  
  
"Look, the fire was actually my fault. Nineteen. Reckless. I was trying to improve the design, and totally spaced the heat difference. I went back to the old one after the first new one I sold caught fire." Langly held up a finger. "One. Ever."  
  
"Well, that's definitely a smaller number of fires than I've started accidentally." Reid smiled a little too brightly.  
  
" _You_? How?"  
  
"I mean, there was the one time with the black powder, the time I set the kitchen on fire, the other time I set the kitchen on fire, the time my lab partner decided it was a good idea to scare the shit out of me while I was working with volatile gasses -- that time I almost blew up the room. Massive jet of flame, lots of screaming. I mean, it was out in a second or two, but principally, that was both dangerous and stupid. And technically not my fault." Reid leaned over and grabbed the popcorn, again, setting the bowl next to his hip.  
  
"Somehow, I'm more curious about the _kitchen_." Langly tipped his head back and spotted the bowl. He opened his mouth and pointed, and Reid deposited a greasy bit of popcorn. "Ah, this is the life. Good company, a nice bed, and a gorgeous young fed feeding me popcorn. Does it get better?"  
  
"You know perfectly well what 'better' looks like." Reid raised an eyebrow and let Langly lick the grease from his fingers.  
  
"Better or just different? I dunno, I'm pretty comfortable right here." Langly stretched all the way out, fingertips brushing the wall behind the bed. "Wait, I haven't put your legs to sleep, have I?"  
  
"Not yet, but my right foot is definitely considering it." Reid offered another bit of popcorn, having totally forgotten he'd meant to eat it, himself.  
  
Langly licked the popcorn out of Reid's fingers and considered an answer. "I should stop laying on you, shouldn't I?"  
  
"Maybe you should lay on me differently."  
  
"Didn't you say you weren't into hugs?" Langly teased, sitting up and kicking his bag off the bed. "I could swear you said you weren't into hugs."  
  
"What can I say? I've seen the light," Reid joked, which wasn't really it at all. There was just something about Langly that didn't make his skin crawl, that let him believe he could be safe, like that, in a very different way to the safety of just being alone.  
  
Langly took a slow breath, shoulders squaring, turning a dubious look on Reid. "I don't glow. You were hallucinating."  
  
Reid opened his mouth as if words might come out of it, but after a moment's failure to produce them, he burst out laughing, instead, and moved the popcorn back to the nightstand. "You're never going to be over that, are you?"  
  
"It's been a week. As demonstrated, I can hold a thirty-year grudge." Langly pointedly peeled off his shirt and dropped it off the bed. "You are _never_ going to hear the end of that."  
  
"Never?" Reid put on his very most innocent expression, as he ran a finger down Langly's arm. "I thought you weren't into forever."  
  
"I'm not. You'll be my age, and you'll just get a text from a number that doesn't exist, and all it'll say is 'I STILL DON'T GLOW'." Langly raised his voice and made finger quotes, and Reid started laughing again. "I'll set it up in advance. Just watch me. I won't even have to be alive to make this work."  
  
The laugh caught in Reid's throat. "Don't."  
  
"Sorry. I'm..." Langly shook his head. "I take my own death a little casually, at this point. I keep forgetting you don't."  
  
"It's just the conversation I was having with Byers. There were a lot of things I thought I'd put away. I know that should be funny, but ... I can't make it be. Not right now."  
  
"Then it's a good thing I'm still alive and well."  
  
Reid closed his hand around Langly's, leaned back, and pulled, swinging his own legs up onto the bed as Langly moved. "No shirt," he noted, running a finger down Langly's collarbone. "You sure?"  
  
"Only if you take off that sweater vest." Langly poked Reid in the chest.  
  
"Probably should've mentioned that while I was still sitting up."  
  
"You didn't give me much of a chance."  
  
Somehow, Reid got himself out of the sweater vest without elbowing Langly in the face, which he counted as good fortune and a demonstration of skills he didn't actually have. "Better?" he murmured, dropping the thing off the edge of the bed.  
  
Langly nudged him with one knee. "Move over before you fall off the bed. Or knock me off the bed. I didn't get a California king so I could end up on the floor."  
  
Without another word, Reid jammed a hand under Langly's knee and rolled over, Langly's legs crossing behind his back.  
  
"That works too..." Langly's glasses sat askew until he pulled them off and tossed them at the nightstand, listening to make sure they hit and didn't slide off the other side. Instead, he heard them land in the popcorn. That... was going to be a problem, but it was one he could have later.  
  
Reid looked down. "I probably shouldn't be on top of you, though..."  
  
"I'm perfectly capable of rolling us back over, if I need to," Langly pointed out, fingers already unbuttoning Reid's shirt. "But, I don't want to." Untucking Reid's shirt, he undid the last buttons, and then grabbed the sides of the shirt and pulled.  
  
Reid let Langly drag him down into a slow, lazy kiss, the press of skin on skin somehow almost sacred, between them. Was that now? Was that a memory trying to inject itself into the present? Did it matter? He let the thought pass, trying to get his arms into a less cramped position without leaning on Langly's hair.  
  
"Ow," Langly muttered into the kiss, letting go of one side of Reid's shirt to tap his arm.  
  
"Sorry." Reid moved his elbow and tried to tuck Langly's hair out of his way. "You all right? Besides the hair..."  
  
"I'm amazing," Langly breathed, as the shivers started, flexing his legs to pull Reid closer.  
  
"Good." Reid nipped at the edge of Langly's jaw, pressing long, slow kisses to Langly's neck, as his hips rolled, more out of reflex than desire.  
  
Langly trembled and panted, clutching at Reid's shirt with some distant concern for the seams. His mind struggled to make sense of the sensations, of the raw, electric flashes that tore through his chest and numbed his fingers, the soft warmth against his neck, the suggestion of something more grinding against his bony ass. Too much? Not enough? This wasn't something he usually wanted, but it seemed important, somehow. The memory of Reid's bare skin pressed against his back, that first time, lit a fire in him, low between his hips.  
  
"I want you," he panted, and heard Reid swallow.  
  
Reid stopped moving, suddenly awkward. "I don't think that's going to happen. Not... now. The mind is willing, but the body has offered me both middle fingers and checked out." He swallowed again. "Most of the mind is willing."  
  
"What'd I break?" Langly sounded concerned.  
  
"It's not you." Reid managed an exhausted sound that was nearly a breathy laugh, edged with despair. "Tell me about the nightmares."  
  
"Whoa. Wow. Not sexy. What the hell, Reid?" And that was definitely concern, maybe a touch of very old terror.  
  
"That's the day I'm having. That's the talk I had with Byers. That's the idea of seeing what's happened to my apartment, knowing everything's been touched and moved. I'm not sure 'distract me with sex' is an option, today." Reid buried his face against Langly's neck. "I just want to stay right here and..." There was an end to that sentence, but he wasn't sure what it was.  
  
Langly unwrapped himself from around Reid. "New plan. Less pants for _you_ , because I know you don't like sleeping in them. And then we'll get under the covers and pretend the monsters can't get us, there."  
  
Reid wanted to be angry, but as he pushed himself up and got a look at Langly's face, he could see that wasn't a joke. "Pretend?"  
  
"We both know it's too late. The monsters already got us. We're never getting rid of them." Langly reached up and tucked Reid's hair behind his ear. "And the blankets were never safe, but we made them that way. Come on, I'm pretty sure I've got a penlight in the drawer. Monsters have to stay outside, because we said so."  
  
"I want you to know this is the stupidest thing I've done in my adult life, and I'm counting the last time I got drunk with Garcia." Reid sat up, looking away as he shed his shirt and got up to get his trousers past his hips. He could feel the ache in his chest and knew it was a dull echo of what it had been, those few years ago, but his face stayed blank, even as his hands started to feel like they belonged to someone else.  
  
"You asked about the nightmares, so I'm guessing Byers opened his big damn mouth and told you all about that." A bitter laugh slipped out of Langly, as he shoved the blankets down around him and got under them. "They stopped, here. In this bed. Byers said I was acting out, when I bought it. Did you see his bed? It's the size of a goddamn coffin. I was free, I was rich, and I could do whatever the hell I wanted, as long as it didn't involve anyone ever seeing my face again. I bought a bed my feet didn't stick off the end of. Spent days in it, when it first came in. Me, a case of Funyuns, a case of Jolt, and my laptop. Refused to talk to anyone for days. I put the magic back in the blankets, and after a while, the nightmares stayed on the other side of them. Stupid? Sure. But, it worked, so who cares?"  
  
"It's probably just having a bed that's bigger than the backseat of a car," Reid pointed out.  
  
"Says the guy who sleeps on a loveseat," Langly shot back, pulling the penlight out of the drawer and testing it. "Maybe you should try it."  
  
"I can't really afford anywhere with more space, and even if I could, I'd have to move." Reid shrugged, still not looking at Langly, as he got under the covers, relaxing subtly as Langly pulled him closer.  
  
"I'll think of something."  
  
"Somehow, that seems... concerning." Reid curled up against Langly's shoulder, like he'd gotten so used to doing, and Langly pulled the covers up, tucking the sheet into a cable clip stuck to the wall.  
  
"I have fantastic plans. What are you talking about?" Langly drawled, the shiver starting high in his back, and Reid laughed, almost believably amused.


	26. The Seventh Day

Langly put a hand on Reid's arm, as they walked toward the front. "Let Byers pull the car around. The dock's not as wide as it looks."  
  
Reid pulled out his keys and offered them to Byers. "You know, I can actually drive surprisingly well. FBI agent? Defensive driving?"  
  
"Not that surprising. I saw the aerial photos from the desert," Frohike cut in. "You're better than me, but Byers has some voodoo pact with the basement."  
  
Reid looked confused. "From the--" His eyes widened as the pieces slotted together in his head and individually meaningless fragments of memory slammed into him, each one like another ton of bricks.  
  
"And this is the sound of me changing the subject!" Langly announced, slipping an arm firmly around Reid's waist, just in case. "I'm taking two cans of potatoes and a few other things, because Special Agent Chicken Noodle Stirfry hasn't learned to keep non-perishables, and there's no food in that place."  
  
"I have coffee and granola bars!" Reid protested. "I'm pretty sure there's still a box of corn flakes!"  
  
"Soup veg," Frohike decided, nodding at Langly.  
  
"Already on the list, right next to egg noodles and chicken broth." Langly handed the list to Byers.  
  
"Those are my raspberries, Langly." Byers sighed as he looked over the list.  
  
"So buy more. We can afford them. It's not the most expensive investment we've made this month." Langly rolled his eyes.  
  
"The raspberries aren't--" Reid started, but Langly cut him off.  
  
"You're getting raspberries, and Byers is getting more raspberries. Two to one, Byers. I just don't want to get stuck waiting for shipping. And it's not even the last can!"  
  
"He's right. It's not even close. You laid in like three cases the last time they were on sale," Frohike pointed out.  
  
After a bit more bickering over necessities, Langly managed to negotiate a small portion of the enormous amount of apocalypse food they kept in the cellar. None of the dairy would go with him, because they'd all seen the aftermath of Reid and cream cheese, but what Byers loaded into the car was probably enough to feed Reid for months, even if most of it was things Langly was fond of.  
  
At the door, Byers handed back the keys. "It's been a pleasure, Dr Reid. I hope to see you again under less... exciting circumstances."  
  
"Thank you. I'm sure we'll meet again, and I'll be happy to take a look at anything you send my way." Reid put an arm around Langly. "And I promise to send him home in the same number of pieces he left."  
  
"I should probably be more worried about Langly, but he's pretty good at getting out of most of the things he gets himself into." Byers clapped a hand on Langly's shoulder. "Do us all a favour and take an Uber home."  
  
"Screw you," Langly huffed, batting Byers's hand aside. "Do us all a favour and get laid."  
  
"I don't think that would be at all appropriate for a first date," Byers protested, and Reid cleared his throat and looked into the distance, lips tight.  
  
Langly looked completely smug for a total of three seconds. "Look, I promise I'll make it home in one piece. Now, you promise you'll go on this damned date."  
  
"I'll go, I'll go." Byers made shooing motions with his hands. "Get in the car before you get caught on a camera that doesn't belong to us."

* * *

As Reid came up the stairs, the first thing he smelled was Garcia's perfume. He found her standing at his door, talking to someone on the phone. Langly lingered close behind him, aiming for the lower visibility offered by staying close to someone his own height.  
  
"Oh! Here he is! Yes, I'll call you back." Garcia hung up the phone and held out a hand to Reid. "Reid! It's so very good to see you! We've been worried, and--"  
  
"You've had my phone this whole time," Reid pointed out, glancing at the hand and then ignoring it. "And my house keys."  
  
"Yes! You're right. Of course." Garcia reached into her bag and came up with an evidence bag, containing the phone, and a ring of keys that she flipped through, before nodding and holding them out. "Is that Frank, behind you? We were so afraid you'd be coming back alone, to ... all this. I just... volunteered."  
  
Langly stepped out from behind Reid, keeping himself angled so his face wouldn't be visible if someone looked out a peephole. "None other." He awkwardly shook Garcia's hand.  
  
"Have you been taking good care of our genius?" Garcia asked, smiling warmly and gripping Langly's hand just hard enough to suggest the cost of the wrong answer.  
  
"Yes, he has," Reid cut in, reaching past Garcia to unlock the door. "Not to be rude, but my apartment's a disaster, I haven't been home in a week, I smell like someone else's laundry soap, and the car is still full of groceries."  
  
Garcia pushed her purse into Reid's other hand. "Spence, you take care of you. Frank and I will go get the groceries. Car keys?"  
  
Reid looked like he might protest, but Langly held his hand out for the keys.  
  
"We got this. Go put on some coffee and sit down."  
  
"Fine," Reid sighed, handing the keys to Langly and finally opening the door. It was bad. He'd known, but seeing it was a different thing. Smashed glass still littered the floor in front of his desk. The chair was still covered in sticky tabs, pointing out the stains. Rugs had been kicked out of place, curling at the corners. The couch wasn't sitting square. He could remember sending Rossi to get him a sheet, to get Langly some clothes.  
  
"Spence?" Garcia was still at his elbow. He hadn't moved from the doorway.  
  
"Not looking so good, Reid," Langly chimed in, from a bit behind him, setting down his own bag, just in case something went wrong.  
  
Reid dropped the few things he held and bolted for the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.  
  
Langly picked up Garcia's purse and the bag of clothes Reid had been carrying, setting both on top of the shelves beside the door. The keys went into his pocket, and he kicked his bag into the room, leaving it next to the door. "We're just going to get the groceries! We'll be right back!"  
  
"He's not okay!" Garcia argued, as Langly pulled the door shut and locked it behind him.  
  
"And he's going to be even less okay in a minute, because I doubt your people fixed the hole in the tile." Langly gestured toward the stairs. "Just give him a few minutes to calm down. We're just going down to the car and back."  
  
"How did you get him to buy food? He never keeps anything here, if his mother isn't in town." Garcia asked, curiosity finally getting the better of her, as she led the way back down.  
  
"I didn't. I basically just unloaded our pantry into the backseat of his car." Langly shrugged, offering his best faux innocent look, as Garcia glanced back at him.  
  
"I always knew you were good people." Garcia reached back and squeezed his hand, gratefully.  
  
"So, date with Fitz, huh?" Langly raised an eyebrow and waited for Garcia to explain.

* * *

When the front door opened, Reid was sitting on the coffee table, with a rag and a can of mink oil in his hands, working on the leather of the sofa. If he could get this end of the room back in order -- the easiest part, most likely -- he'd at least have somewhere to sit, when it all got to be too much. And that was something he expected to happen every fifteen minutes or so. At least he'd gotten the glass off the floor and turned on the dishwasher. There would be no coffee until the coffeemaker stopped being mouldy.  
  
"But, really, he seems like such a sweetheart!" Garcia was saying, as she came in, burdened with shopping bags filled with huge cans, Langly right behind her.  
  
"He's got all the personality of wallpaper paste, but he's always been popular with the ladies." Langly shook his head, angling the inordinate number of bags he was carrying through the door.  
  
"Bad news." Reid looked up from the couch. "Kitchen's disgusting. A bad case of 'I'll get that in the morning' left out all week. Windows are open, dishes are in the dishwasher, but it's pretty bad in there. Nobody took the trash out, either."  
  
Langly put the bags he was carrying on the table that had held the bowl of stones he'd thrown at Narcisse. "I got the trash. Don't worry about it."  
  
"La--" Reid closed his eyes, sighed, and tried again. "Frank, you vomit at the drop of a hat."  
  
"At the drop of a corpse, thank you very much." Langly folded his arms.  
  
Garcia edged past him to add her bags to the pile. "Garbage is mine, my stringy studmuffin. You get to wash the counters and pour bleach in the drains."  
  
Langly looked at himself. A whiter shirt than usual. "Yeah, okay. You probably want to check the fridge, too. I think he left half a sandwich in there."  
  
"You know I can do this for myself, right?" Reid protested, weakly, moving out of Garcia's way, just the same.  
  
"It doesn't matter if you can. What matters is that we're here, we care, and you _know us_ ," Garcia assured him, patting his cheek as she edged toward the kitchen.  
  
Once she'd passed, Reid stood the coffee table on end and leaned it against one of the windows, where it wouldn't be in the way. He needed to clean this rug, anyway. His eyes wandered back to the chair, to the obvious stains still white against the fabric, some of them obviously scraped as potential evidence. Great. His sex life was now evidence. And would likely be brought up in court.  
  
Langly opened his own bag, the sound of the zipper sharp in the near silence of the room. "Got disinfectant wipes?"  
  
"Under the bathroom sink." Reid sounded dazed, the rag hanging from his fingers as he tried to remember what he was doing.  
  
"Hold your breath, my darlings!" Garcia announced, before she stepped out of the kitchen, bearing the week-old garbage, and headed as straight as possible toward the front door.  
  
Langly gagged as she passed, sticking his face in the canister of wipes. "You win. I didn't need that."  
  
"Nobody needs this," Garcia said, with a cheerful smile, as she slipped out the door.  
  
Langly took his own hairbrush and a disinfectant wipe and started on the chair, while he waited for the kitchen to finish airing out. "Chair's fine," he told Reid. "Nothing's going to stick to this for long. Clean it with the brush and then wipe it down to be sure."  
  
"And you're going to brush your hair with that, later." Reid found the can of mink oil and crouched back in front of the couch.  
  
"I'm pretty sure there's nothing on this chair that I haven't gotten in my hair at some point, anyway."  
  
Reid opened his mouth to protest, but realised that was probably true, and went back to working the oil into the couch.  
  
With three of them working, it only took a few hours before the place was back to the usual levels of disaster, possibly even a little cleaner, as Reid had laid siege to things that had nothing to do with crime that had been committed in his living room. His desk was clear. The windows were washed. The couch looked less decrepit. Only one thing remained, and they all knew it.  
  
"Still a bullet hole in the bathroom," Langly pointed out, as they looked around the apartment.  
  
"Repairs are probably coming out of my pocket. According to the lease, any damages resulting from the commission of a crime inside the apartment are my problem." Reid sighed and pressed his palms against his eyes, willing the grinding annoyance to stop.  
  
"We'll just see about that." Garcia's eyes flashed. "I'll call Prentiss, and if she can't make them see the light, I'll put in the repair ticket for you. Nobody sees it until someone gets sent to fix it. Problem solved."  
  
"Yeah, but he's still going to get billed for it, later," Langly pointed out. "I could just... pay for it."  
  
"Or I could delete all record of the repair after it happens." Garcia smiled brightly.  
  
"Remind me why you switched sides?" Langly teased.  
  
"Where else am I going to get an equipment budget bigger than your..." Garcia looked him up and down. "... house?"  
  
Despite himself, Reid cracked up. There were too many people in his living room, but they were good people, people he liked, people who could, apparently, make him laugh, even now. He sank into the freshly-cleaned chair, and tried to convince himself it hadn't been that funny.  
  
"I should be concerned," Garcia decided, watching Reid fail to stop laughing.  
  
"Nah, he's just hysterical. He'll be fine. Long day." Langly shook his head.  
  
"Yes, he gets like this, but this is the third day or the third drink." Garcia continued to look uncertain.  
  
"Ten bucks says the minute you leave, he starts crying."  
  
"I'd take you up on that, but he'd never admit to it, and I'm not taking your word for it, if we've got money on it."  
  
"No bugs?" Langly asked, looking sideways at Garcia.  
  
"... None of _mine_." Garcia looked up at Langly, who nodded decisively.  
  
"Right, we're checking." Langly went to his bag and pulled out two black boxes, tossing one to Garcia. "Pretty standard design, hits all the major frequencies and a few weird ones. I trust you know what to do with it." It wasn't a question.  
  
Garcia nodded. "I'll start in the kitchen, you start in the bedroom?"  
  
"Go." Langly nodded and headed off.  
  
In minutes, they'd checked the whole apartment, and Garcia had finally remembered to put on the coffee they'd meant to start, hours ago. Reid had finally stopped laughing, and was curled up in the chair, flipping through a stack of documents, with a pen in one hand.  
  
"I think we're clear," Langly said, jamming the box in his back pocket and descending upon the kitchen in pursuit of a cup of coffee.  
  
"I'm not surprised," Garcia admitted. "Narcisse hadn't been in here, until that night. I'm currently looking into whose fingers I have to step on over the breach that gave her access to his calls, because if that's a thing we have to worry about, then we have even more problems coming."  
  
"I'd give you a spec to present, but it'd never fly. Also, I'd be pissed if it went into use, because I designed it so _I_ can't break it." Langly laughed and brought coffee to Reid, setting it on the desk before he sat on the other arm of the chair with his own cup.  
  
"The other phones." Garcia suddenly made the connection.  
  
"Yeah, those'll never work again. Remote-triggered self-destruct, and then shut down the network. There's nothing left to find. They look like a half-finished project." Langly shrugged.  
  
"You go through all that, and then you walk in here, in the middle of the day, in sight of every camera in the neighbourhood." Garcia cocked her head, obviously expecting an explanation.  
  
Reid looked up from his papers. "Can we not have that conversation while I'm in the room, thanks?"  
  
"He's trying not to think about it." Langly cocked a thumb at Reid. " _I'm_ trying not to think about it."  
  
"You take care of him, Ringo," Garcia warned, stepping close enough that Langly had to pull his coffee out of her way. "I know the kind of... things you get up to, and I do not want you getting him involved. I do not want you getting involved in anything that's going to come back on him, do you hear me?"  
  
"I swear I wasn't looking at the screen for any of that." Reid didn't look up from his work, but the amusement was clear in his voice.  
  
" _What did you do?_ " Garcia demanded, jabbing a finger at Langly.  
  
"No. I'm not talking about that." Langly's lips thinned and he shook his head. "You don't want to know."  
  
"Don't look at me. I don't actually know the part you're asking about and the part you're not asking about, you _definitely_ don't want to know about." Reid circled something and leaned on Langly's back to make a note in the margin. "Unless you do, in which case I have serious questions about the state of our relationship."  
  
Horror blossomed slowly across Garcia's face as the implications soaked in, and she jabbed Langly in the nose with one brightly-polished fingernail. "That is _exactly_ what I'm talking about. You can't take those kind of risks! You can't let yourself get distracted like that!"  
  
"It wasn't a risk. It was a cakewalk. I could've done it in my sleep, and that's all I'm saying about that." Langly shook his head. "You want details, you can make Fitz squirm for them."  
  
"... Why does Fitz know?" Garcia asked, finally stepping back.  
  
"Why do my neighbours know?" Reid muttered.  
  
"And on that note, I'll be taking my leave of you two lovebirds. Try not to annoy the neighbours in my absence!" Garcia went for her purse. "Or in my presence... Definitely not in my presence."  
  
"Lovebirds?" Reid looked up. "I'll have you know this is purely physical relationship, and I'm entirely comfortable with that fact!"  
  
"No, you're not, Spence. I know you." Garcia blew a kiss as she let herself out, and Langly got up to lock the door behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally coming toward the end of this one, and then... ON TO THE NEXT. ( ~~because i've been waiting to get there since like the middle of day 2~~ )


	27. Chapter 27

  
Reid stayed curled in the chair for hours, working his way through all the things on his desk he'd left unfinished before his unexpected holiday. Left to his own devices, Langly got into the neighbour's wireless and followed the couple next door through an assortment of shopping, news, and porn. And they didn't even have good taste in porn, as far as he was concerned, but he'd been spoiled by Frohike's virtual vaults of the stuff. Eventually, he got up and made dinner -- a potato-thickened vegetable soup and soggy raspberries in thinly reconstituted almond butter. Not bad for non-dairy and not his kitchen, he thought.  
  
He had to pry Reid away from what looked like an infinite heap of paper, although he could probably estimate it in reams without much thought -- a perpetual side effect of working in publishing. You never forgot the size of the paper you used. Eventually, putting a steaming bowl of soup on the document Reid was working on got him to put down the pen and eat.  
  
"You feeling a little better?" Langly asked, perched in Reid's desk chair, with a cup of raspberry gunk.  
  
"I can't tell." Reid shrugged, spooning some of the strange dessert into his mouth. "This is better than it looks."  
  
"That is a lot of years of experimentation." Langly pointed with his spoon. "I figured I'd hold off on the ambrosia salad, until I know you better."  
  
"By all means, do." Reid paused, eyebrows raised, spoon in his mouth, as he studied Langly's face, trying to decide if that had been rude.  
  
"Just for that, I'm making funeral potatoes for breakfast."  
  
"I'm sorry, _what_ potatoes?" Reid blinked.  
  
"Funeral potatoes. You know, the casserole with the potatoes and the cheese and the-- oh, shit, we don't have any cheese and I'm not supposed to be feeding you cheese. No funeral potatoes for you." Langly huffed and went back to scraping the last of the raspberry-almond sludge off the inside of the cup.  
  
"I don't think we had those where I came from. Or at least we called them something else." Reid was still staring across the room in confusion.  
  
"They're what you bring the family when somebody dies. They're funeral potatoes. Potatoes for a funeral. Except they're really good, so people started just bringing them to family reunions and bingo nights. Name never changed."  
  
"Language is weird," Reid proclaimed, a conclusion he came to about three times a week.  
  
"You're weird," Langly retorted, putting his cup down on a clear bit of the desk. "What kind of barbarian outpost do you come from, that they don't have funeral potatoes?"  
  
"Las Vegas is hardly a barbarian outpost," Reid protested, drinking the last of the raspberry-almond ... whatever it was straight from the cup. "It is a little weird, though. Gave me completely unreasonable expectations for the rest of the country."  
  
"Las Vegas is totally a barbarian outpost. Been there, hacked that. Teeming masses of cowboys and idiots, and none of the locals believed in good encryption or basic network security." Langly shook his head. "I could've been happy there, if things didn't go so bad so fast."  
  
"I feel like that's really the essence of Vegas in a nutshell. 'I could've been happy there, but...'" Reid reached for the document he'd been working on, before dinner, and Langly slapped his hand.  
  
"It's Friday night."  
  
"And I have to go back to work, on Monday, and I'm a week behind on my mail."  
  
"You're a week behind on your mail every time you leave town."  
  
"Yes, and I'd like to catch up, for once," Reid snapped, suddenly pale and stunned with the vehemence of his response.  
  
"Do it tomorrow. You just got home, and we did most of the cleaning for you. Just take a minute. Look around. What did we miss?"  
  
"Besides the bathroom? Nothing. I was right behind you. Everything's where it goes. Everything's cleaner than it's been in a year, at least." Reid shook his head and glanced around the room, anyway. "There's a couple of things that are still missing, but they got broken in the fight."  
  
"Photos?" Langly asked, getting up and gathering the dishes. "I'll send them to Frohike. I bet we can find what you're missing."  
  
"No photos. _Never_ here."  
  
"Crime scene photos it is." Langly vanished into the kitchen to load the dishwasher. "If anybody can figure out what the piles of broken shit used to be, it's Frohike."  
  
"You don't have to do this," Reid protested. "What's gone is gone."  
  
"Yeah, but it doesn't have to be."  
  
"You have spent a lot of money just... giving me things. I don't know exactly how I feel about that, but it makes me very nervous," Reid admitted, as Langly came back out of the kitchen, looking only slightly out of place.  
  
"We give more to charity in a month than I've spent on you. I could buy you a nice little house by the bay, and I'd still have spent less. We got sent away with a _lot_ of money, and I have turned it into much more. And we have it so we can spend it where it needs to go. And sometimes that means addressing serious social problems, and sometimes it means making sure that the people we like have all the things they need, so they can do what they want to do and go where they're needed." Langly sat on the arm of the chair. "We've been poor. We've been the kind of poor where fights started about a packet of noodles. Money's not enough, but it sure as hell helps. And for me, it's all just numbers, now. You don't owe us anything. And seriously, if I thought you'd move, I'd buy you a house."  
  
"I don't want a house. The commute would be horrible." Reid blinked as he realised that wasn't the argument he'd meant to make, at all. "I'm comfortable. I have what I need. I can take care of myself and my mother."  
  
"I still say you should have access to more than just the basics."  
  
Reid reached up and tipped Langly backward, into his lap. "I do. I have you. You are... definitely more than just the basics."  
  
"You sweet talker, you." Langly looked up, a wry smile firmly fixed.  
  
"I could never have imagined you -- and even if I could, this isn't where that would've ended up, in my head. But, I'm pretty sure I can be happy with what we have, whatever that turns out to be."  
  
"A purely physical relationship," Langly teased, poking Reid in the chest and getting his hand swatted away. "That's what you told the Black Queen. And what does she mean ' _no, you're not comfortable_ ', by the way?"  
  
"This isn't something I do, and she knows it. She's watched ... every relationship I've ever had, honestly, even if most of that was from the kind of distance that should've involved a telescope. She _does_ know what I'm like." Reid cleared his throat and studied the window next to them. "I'm a romantic. I fall _hard_."  
  
"You did fall hard. Right on my junk," Langly joked. "And then you got hard, and the rest is history."  
  
"And that's really pretty different, for me. Doesn't mean I don't like it." Reid ran his fingers through Langly's hair. "Sometimes, it's good to try new things."  
  
"I'd drink to that, if I was holding one."  
  
"Or you could just kiss me," Reid suggested.  
  
Langly stopped leaning on the arm on the chair and did so, a slow, warm kiss that built in intensity as Reid clutched at him, leaning into it, nipping and sucking at his lip. "Strictly physical, hmm?" he breathed, the words pulling his lip back from Reid's teeth. "And how physical do you want this to get?"  
  
"Physical enough that we should just start on the floor, so we don't knock anything over." Reid looked up the inch or two between them. "You want me not working, tonight? Distract me."  
  
Langly swallowed hard, mouth suddenly dry, as those words lanced through him like a bolt to the crotch. "Yeah?"  
  
Reid nodded, a faint smile on his lips. "We'll make the neighbours move in self-defence."  
  
Langly was up in an instant, grabbing the blanket off the back of the couch, which he realised hadn't been washed, the instant his hand connected with it. None of the laundry had been done, yet. Tomorrow's problem, he'd thought. But, a quick glance at Reid said he either hadn't yet remembered, or was trying not to think about it, so with a flick of the wrists, Langly covered the floor in front of the desk, hoping the blanket would be thick enough to keep any fragments of smashed glass they'd missed away from them.  
  
By the time he'd straightened the edges, looking to cover as much of the floor as possible, to cut down on the possibility of glass, Reid was standing, halfway through unbuttoning his shirt. Langly couldn't tear his eyes away, as Reid stripped with modest precision, draping each article of clothing over the back of the couch, to be dealt with. later. It was with some hesitance and a glance at the gauzy drapes that the last article of clothing was removed, and Reid crossed to the blanket, with a few small, careful steps, the same fear of unexpected glass suddenly asserting itself in his mind.  
  
"I have to get the rugs cleaned. Properly," Reid noted absently, as he lowered himself to the blanket, looking expectantly up at where Langly still stood dumbstruck.  
  
Langly blinked a few times, trying to distinguish the words that had probably happened when Reid's lips moved. Glancing down at himself, he realised he was still dressed and corrected that oversight as quickly as possible, nearly knocking himself over, trying to pull his jeans off before he'd gotten out of his shoes. "Rugs. Yes. You should absolutely have those cleaned. But, for right now, a blanket, which is much softer and less walked-on."  
  
He finally toppled onto the blanket, shoes off, shirt on, and one foot still stuck in his jeans. "Hey."  
  
"Bed's easier, isn't it," Reid remarked, amusement plain on his face.  
  
"You being naked makes everything harder. Yes, I mean that both ways." Langly finally managed to kick his pants off and reached for things he knew he'd put in his bag.  
  
"We keep trying to do this, and it keeps not going as planned." Reid leaned back onto his elbows, one knee bent and canted outward, invitingly. "This time? No distractions, enough lube, enough condoms, and hopefully I'll last a little longer than you, this time."  
  
"No distractions?" Langly asked, kneeling between Reid's legs, tracing his fingertips worshipfully down Reid's chest.  
  
"You're the only distraction I want, right now." Reid offered a small smile. "'Want' might be understating it a bit."  
  
Langly reached up and unplugged the desk phone. "One less distraction."  
  
"Remind me to plug that in before we go to sleep." Reid eyed the unplugged phone, warily, half-sure someone would call just because he was home, and then show up at the door, when he didn't pick up. Hopefully, the 'welcome home' calls wouldn't start until morning. If he was honest with himself, and wished for the stars, no one would say anything until he showed up on Monday. Or maybe just say nothing at all, like he'd never been gone. But, he'd been found with nothing on but the naked man in his arms, and that was unlikely to pass without comment.  
  
He tipped his head back for the kisses Langly laid along his neck, accepting them as if he deserved nothing less. And that was a strange thought, and one he didn't much like. Rather, he desired, and Langly shared those desires, every kiss another gift, another promise of more. And then Langly's tongue dragged across his nipple, and the thinking let itself out and left the door it used hanging in the breeze.  
  
Reid lost himself in the sensation of skin on skin, of tongue on skin, of Langly's fingers in places only Langly's fingers and his own had ever been, and he didn't knead and tease _himself_ like that. And once those fingers were inside him, he lowered himself all the way to the blanket, arms stretched above his head, rocking his hips, biting his lips against the sounds of pleasure that felt like they started in his chest. Only little chuffs and squeaks of desire manifested outside his lips. It was unreal, how the need to stay quiet after a week of giving voice to every desire, to every proof of his pleasure, made his legs tremble, even as they bore no weight.  
  
"Tell me," Langly breathed against his ear, and that was when the first moan passed Reid's lips unobstructed.  
  
"I want you inside me, so tight I can feel your pulse in my teeth," Reid hissed, trying to keep his teeth together and the volume down.  
  
Any words Langly might've considered following that with lodged in his throat, and all he managed was a breathy click. His fingers stroked just where he knew Reid would be most distracted by them, as he tried for a sentence and finally settled for, "I swear you're trying to kill me."  
  
"And me, unarmed!" A breathy chuckle followed.  
  
Langly glanced down, between them, mostly not to miss with the lube, this time. "Hell of a weapon for an unarmed man," he joked.  
  
"No." Reid pointed firmly. "No dagger jokes. None. Sword, pistol, and lance are also right out, as is whatever it was I just watched cross your mind. Not in what serves as the bedroom, not in relation to any part of my anatomy."  
  
"Limits are good. I was never that fond of firearm metaphors." Langly finished rolling on a condom and leaned forward again. "But, you're also talking to Lord Dick Joke. So, I'll try to remember, but I'll ask you not to smack me too hard, if I forget."  
  
"Not too hard, and not in anything I'm expecting you to use, in the immediate future." Reid reached up and twisted his fingers into Langly's hair. "Speaking of which, weren't you going to put your great big--"  
  
"It's not that big."  
  
"It's the biggest thing that's ever been jammed into my lower intestines, and I'd really like to keep it that way." Reid's smile had all the charm of glass filament as he kneaded Langly's thigh with his toes. "Come on, before I do any more damage to the moment, and have to return to reviewing articles in shame."  
  
"As long as you're doing it naked..." Langly teased, waiting to feel Reid relax against him, before he pushed in, Reid's hands tight around his arms. "You okay?"  
  
Reid nodded, pulling Langly closer with a heel against his tailbone. "More."  
  
"If you clamp down again, I'm not going to last," Langly warned.  
  
"I don't want you to last. I want to watch your face, when you start to shiver. I want to put you on your back while your eyes are still rolled back in your head, so I can be inside you before you even start to come down." Reid cleared his throat and studied the foot of his desk. "Assuming you want that."  
  
"It's a pretty good assumption. We keep trying." Langly pushed almost the rest of the way in, slow and hard, breath catching when Reid wrung him tight. Pain? Pleasure? Langly _did not care_ , as Reid's hips rolled, the pressure becoming almost unbearable. His legs tightened, his hips jerked, and he could hear Reid's muffled sounds of pleasure as his vision went white.  
  
The room shifted, or maybe he shifted. Langly missed a few steps between the throbbing in his dick that he could feel in his head and being pinned against the blanket-covered floor, with Reid easing slowly off of him.  
  
"Still want me?" Reid asked, condom wrapper in his teeth, but not yet torn.  
  
It took Langly a moment to remember he had to answer that with words. "If you don't fuck me right fucking now, I'm going to... just... cry. A lot."  
  
"Can't have that." Reid managed a wry smile as he dealt with the condom and poured lube into his hand, letting it run down his fingers as he pressed them into Langly.  
  
The reaction was instant. Langly's hips bucked at the first teasing touch, nerves still humming with the orgasm he wasn't quite convinced he'd finished having, and those fingers touching him right where he wanted it, right where he needed it. He pressed his wrist into his mouth, trying to hold back the sounds his body had begun to insist were part of the experience. Writhing, the tension in his back, in his legs, an exquisite counterpoint to the waves of pleasure washing up his chest from just barely inside him, where Reid's fingertips traced tiny circles, just enough pressure to make him wish he was hard again.  
  
And then the touch was gone, and Langly felt his chest clench, before he felt what he wanted, hot, hard, and slick. A moment's painful pressure, a sound muffled with his wrist, and Reid was inside him.  
  
"You all right?" Reid asked, his clean hand gently stroking Langly's arm, as Langly's legs wrapped around him.  
  
After a bit of attempting to stare sense into him, Langly managed to get his wrist out of his mouth. "Fuck me," he demanded. "Fuck me like your dick is the only thing that matters."  
  
"I'm afraid I'll hurt you, again," Reid admitted, slowly rolling his hips.  
  
"Then use more lube." Langly's wrist went back into his mouth and he pulled his knees up higher.  
  
Reid gave in, first to the practicality of more lube, and then to his own lust and Langly's, the bliss on Langly's face all the confirmation he needed that he'd done the right thing. Still, he tempted fate, ran a hand down Langly's still-clothed side as he let the fire between his hips define the pace, the force. Langly held him just tight enough, thighs clamped against his sides, and that squeeze every time Langly's hips dropped.  
  
"Tell me," he panted, closer by the moment, but not quite reaching the edge.  
  
Langly swallowed and pulled his wrist out of his mouth, teeth marks practically glowing against the pale skin. "Harder," he panted. "I want you to fuck me raw. I want you to come inside me. I want to feel it. I want you to fuck me bare, skin on skin, and leave me wet and dripping. Fuck it out of me with your fingers, when you're done. Make me ache. Make me come again. Just fuck me. Fuck me _harder_!"  
  
And that was it -- the rush of desperate lust from the man under him was the last push Reid needed. Harder? Langly could have harder, the sound of sweat sticking, skin meeting skin, and that open-mouthed look, eyes rolled back, that told Reid he'd done exactly what Langly meant. His rhythm broke, hips rolling in the middle of thrusts, legs shaking, sweat dripping against Langly's shirt. He reached down and slid the forgotten condom off Langly, halfassedly tossing it aside, figuring he'd be doing laundry in the morning, anyway. Two still-slick fingers caressed the half-hard flesh, and Langly arched under him, hips dropping hard, less than forceful spurts dribbling over the curve of Langly's hip, and Reid followed him down, stars spotting his vision and the space behind his eyes.  
  
When Reid's vision cleared, Langly was still shaking, hand pressed over his mouth, eyes squeezed shut. "You all right?"  
  
Langly nodded, held up his other thumb. After a moment, he managed words, cracked and sticky. "Remember what you said about a mutiny? I get it."  
  
"That's twice now--" Reid stopped, tried again. "What do you need me to do?"  
  
"Come down here?"  
  
Reid considered the somewhat contorted position they were in. "Move your legs? It's going to be just a minute. And, out," he warned, easing back and watching Langly shiver harder under him. "I'll be right there," he promised, disposing of both condoms in the desk bin, before he stretched out next to Langly, who curled up against his side, in a reversal of how this usually went.  
  
"You're warm," Langly muttered, tears in his eyes, still, as Reid gently stroked his side.  
  
"I'm not going to be warm for long. Covered in sweat, naked, in the middle of the living room floor, and laying on the blanket." Reid made no effort to move.  
  
"Probably glass in the blanket," Langly pointed out, and Reid groaned. "Put this in the wash, but I'm buying you a new one. Then we can have two blankets on the floor."  
  
"For once, I'm not going to argue with you about buying something. My blanket and your blanket. The only time we need both is because we're taking up too much space together."  
  
Langly sniffed, tried to laugh, and coughed. "I have a huge bed, and it is one of the most indulgent things I have ever bought, but we both still fit in that chair."  
  
"We do. But, not with glass in the blanket. I'm not getting glass in the chair." Reid stared at the play of light across the ceiling, feeling Langly start to relax against him. "You know, that's twice you've gone for two like that, and both times have ended in you crying. I'm not sure this is a good idea."  
  
"It's a fantastic idea," Langly argued, tossing a leg across Reid's hips. "I like it. I want it. The crying will stop eventually. Like I said, you nailed it with 'mutiny'. People cry all the time when good shit happens. Just because it's dumb doesn't mean it's not true."  
  
"If you're sure..."  
  
"I'm sure. I'm so sure, I'm afraid I'm going to wake up in my own bed, find out this whole thing was a dream, and never figure out how to get off like that again. Terrifying visions of my future where I continue in celibacy, because everything is still disappointing, disgusting, or horrifically embarrassing."  
  
"I'm pretty sure I'm not a dream, and if I am, I'd like to give back about sixteen years of nightmare living." Reid tried to pull Langly closer, a chill creeping across the sweat on his skin, before he realised it wasn't possible. "Okay, here's the plan: I'm going to get up and get my mother's comforter off her bed. In the morning we'll wash it, I'll put it back, and neither of us will ever speak of this again."  
  
"God, please. You're not warm enough for both of us." Langly laughed and pulled back, shivering, as Reid got up.  
  
"You are one of about four people in the world who know that."  
  
"I'll count myself lucky as soon as there's another blanket involved."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE IT IS: THE END
> 
> And once I finish the end of the month slam that you've got to be used to me taking time for by now, THE NEXT ONE. Another case fic, probably less smut, more strange revelations. ~~Or at least one. The others depend on how many plot threads I decide to start spooling at once.~~


End file.
